]Patients with low back pain will be more thoroughly treated in Wellington County this coming year.
The Mount Forest Family Health Team, Minto-Mapleton Family Health Team and East Wellington Family Health Team learned on Nov. 26 that they were one of seven recipients out of more than 100 applicants to receive funding to be part of the Primary Care Low Back Pain pilot program offered by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care.
Suzanne Trivers, executive director for the Mount Forest Family Health team, is the project lead, charged with ensuring the program is rolled out broadly and seamlessly across rural Wellington County.
The pilot project will fund an entire team of health care providers to work together in determining the root of a patient’s back pain issue.
“The doctor would refer to the team and then the team will have a conversation with that client to talk about what they want, what they’re most comfortable with,” Trivers said. “We want to have some patient say and to make this a patient conversation about what do you think is going to work best for you.”
After this assessment the patients will receive treatment and education about how to prevent future injuries to their back. It’s important to have a full team involved at this stage, Trivers said.
“Chiropractors and physiotherapists and occupational therapists and kinesiologists all have specialty knowledge around bones and muscles and how we move and how we can move differently to save ourselves pain,” she said. “That’s a knowledge base that doctors just don’t have and don’t develop over time.”
Doctors, she said, are specialists in medication and treatment but they aren’t always as skilled in prevention as other health care professionals.
Often, a patient would need to pay for some of these additional services but Trivers said the funding support means there won’t be any extra costs for the more specialized treatment.
To begin, the program will be available to Wellington Country residents who have a physician or nurse practitioner at one of the family health clinics.
“We serve about 95 per cent of the population so essentially we’re open to everybody and if somebody really needed it we’d work around it,” Trivers said.
The Wellington County teams will receive a portion of the total $2.3 million in funding the Ontario government plans to give for the pilot program over the next two years but Trivers said they don’t know a dollar amount or have a firm date for when they’ll begin rolling out the project.
The aim of the program is to reduce the amount of unnecessary diagnostic imaging done for low back pain issues. “For lower back pain, it doesn’t usually end up providing much more information than is already recognized by the patient and the physician,” David Jensen, an Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care spokesperson said.
But improving health is the first priority. “Low back pain can actually lead to other health issues because of the changes in your activity levels it can cause if not well managed or well treated,” Trivers said. “So it’s also very much a preventing chronic disease approach.”
Because the program will be rolled out over three different organizations, Trivers said implementation may very from team to team, but all will have access to the full range of health care professionals.
Even though the Upper Grand Family Health Team isn’t included in the low back pain model, Trivers said the program will ensure patients at the practice have equal access to the similar services.
Also, the Upper Grand Family Health Team, learned it was receiving ongoing funding for a physiotherapist for the first time on Nov. 26, Lana Palmer, executive director for the Upper Grand Family Health Team said.
The physiotherapist will help to improve programs already in place, like the cardio pulmonary program or a heart function clinic.
“Build their confidence in being able to implement exercise programs will be a key thing, I think, that the physiotherapist will be able to provide for us,” Palmer said.
The physiotherapist will spend time at all four family health teams in the county as well as at the hospitals.
A ministry press release states between 50 and 90% of people experience low back pain in their lives. Trivers said the program will hopefully help catch low back pain early.
“This is an issue for the whole population,” Trivers said. “We suspect that we see a slightly higher rate of low back pain in our communities, in rural communities, because of the type of work people do in rural communities.”
