I am very excited to share that I have been asked to provide services out of the Pasqua South Medical Clinic (PSMC) in Regina. This clinic maintains a really unique atmosphere, one I have never experienced in a medical clinic, ever. Think bright colours, up beat staff, and health and wellness to the core, with a holistic approach.
As many of you know, I provide breastfeeding workshops to doulas so they are better prepared to help moms with breastfeeding right after birth and in the early hours. One of the PSMC staff members happens to be a doula and she attended my last workshop. She was pretty intrigued by a lot of the info I was presenting early on in the workshop, and looked at me, eyes wide, and said, "You should be working in a doctor's office". Of course, I giggled, and said something along the lines of, "Well, of course, I agree, but we seem to be a long ways from that in our current model of care."
As the weekend progressed, this attendee was making notes and getting wide eyed and just digesting and processing the info I had to share. She was so excited to have new info to help moms and babies and support breastfeeding. That excitement and eagerness was carried over to the PSMC owner, a family physican. By the end of the weekend the physician and myself were in discussion trying to figure out how to make this idea work.
The awesome thing about this clinic is that it is already a collaborative centre. Having someone like myself join was not a new idea; there was already a massage therapist, a speech language pathologist, physiotherapist, and more will be coming along as the space grows (there is an addition being build as we speak to open this summer).
Within a few weeks of talking we arrived to this:
Now, here is the number one question I get asked at this point: Why if you are working with a physician's office do mothers' have to pay to access your care? The answer is simple; physicians can bill for services they provide. They cannot bill for services they do not provide or oversee. Lactation is not often a medical issue and few cases of healthy breast-feeding babies would need to see a physician. While I was doing research about what this set up could and should look like, I looked at other relationships with physicians and IBCLC's. There are not many in Canada and they all operate differently from one another and differently than what we are envisioning here. When I looked at breastfeeding clinics that we have in Canada, there were not many that would be close to this relationship, aside from The International Breastfeeding Clinic (IBC) in Toronto and the Goldfarb Clinic in Montreal. What is notable in these clinics is despite the names and "hype" around them, they are not free for mothers. Seeing a physician is free, but appointments with the lactation consultants are not or at least until recently they were not always free. At the IBC the IBCLC's are fee for service and just recently the hospital gave funding to the Goldfard clinic for their lactation consultants. Until then there was no funding. The Goldfarb clinic is a specialized clinic, however, the wait list a few weeks long, so mothers often have steps in between. This idea of "fee for service" for lactation/health care is a "new" idea in Saskatchewan, but it really is not a new idea in Canada. If Saskatchewan families want access to good, specialized services then sometimes we have to accept the costs associated with that specialized care. I am hopeful in the future we will have more insurance companies on board and funding will come. That is going to be a big task and I am doing my part in that, but there will be many parts to get to that outcome.
I look forward to seeing many families at the clinic and working as part of a bigger team.
