Nova Scotia reports progress with health-care homes model

The province of Nova Scotia is changing the model of health care is changing from one patient and one doctor to attaching patients to health-care homes.

The face of health care is changing in Nova Scotia and while the province is still dealing with a long list of patients without a family doctor, the model is changing from one patient and one doctor to attaching patients to health-care homes.

Nova Scotia Health interim president and CEO Karen Oldfield says while there’s still work to do, they are making progress.

“Today’s primary health care is delivered by teams that include family physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, dietitians, pharmacists, physiotherapists and so many others,” said Oldfield.

The province is shifting the way it delivers primary care and has been moving its focus to building team-based clinics or health homes for awhile now. There are currently 118 health homes operating across the province.

The Progressive Conservative government, which was elected in August 2021, largely campaigned on a promise to fix health care.

Four years later, Oldfield says they are making great progress now, referencing the number of Nova Scotians they’ve helped connect to primary health care.

Last year there were 160,234 people on the need a family practice wait list. That’s 16.2 per cent of the province’s population.

The latest numbers from July show 89,455 people, or 8.3 per cent of the population, are still on the list.

“I’m ecstatic because the work that we are doing is working,” said Oldfield, who credits a range of strategies from recruitment and retention to new technology in helping bring down the wait list. “It’s a little bit technology and it’s a whole lot of effort from people across the province.”

The provincial introduced the LFM, or Longitudinal Family Medicine, payment model in 2023 for family doctors, which increased their salaries if they take on more patients.

Nova Scotia added 253 new doctors last year, which worked out to a 187 net gain, almost double the number of physicians added the year before.

There are now 536 family physicians and 126 nurse practitioners working across the 118 health homes.

Dr. Colin Newman, president of Nova Scotia’s College of Family Physicians, says education is key.

“Increasing medical school enrollment, creating positive learning environments in family medicine and providing high quality community-based family medicine training to our graduates, is the pathway to putting more well trained family doctors in our community,” said Newman.

Last year Nova Scotia increased the number of family medicine schools seats from 58 to 114.

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