The Peterborough Clinic

Family Health Team use a patient-centered approach to primary health care that brings together doctors, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, social workers, dieticians, pharmacists, and mental health clinicians, as well as other health-care professionals and support staff to coordinate the highest possible quality of care for patients when they need it. Family Health Team are a key component of Ontario’s health care plan to reduce wait times, improve access to primary care, and keep our residents and community healthy.

The family physicians at The Peterborough Clinic formed their Family Health Organization in 2006. They are proud to be a member of the Peterborough Family Health Team — a non-profit organization that was created in 2005 to act as the coordinating agency for the five Peterborough Family Health Organization.

For more information about the Peterborough Family Health Team, please visit www.peterboroughfht.com.

The Peterborough Clinic Family Health Team Programs are located on the main floor behind reception and adjacent to Pharmasave.

The Peterborough Clinic Family Health Organization offers a wide variety of health programs, which will help you manage your own health. Patients rostered to The Clinic’s family physicians are eligible to participate in the following programs:

COPD
The goal of the COPD program is to diagnose and educate patients with COPD to help keep them as healthy as possible. Patients are taught the best way to stay healthy while living with COPD, by learning when they need to be seen by the doctor and what they can do to help slow down their COPD. For more information, please visit the COPD Page.

Smoking Cessation Program
The Smoking Cessation program provides an organized approach to help patients who wish to control their dependence on nicotine and give up smoking in an open, non-judgmental and comfortable environment. With the support of our team the patient will:

Be assessed on their nicotine dependency, reasons for smoking and reasons for quitting
Be given one-on-one supportive counselling
Be offered free nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) as needed
Learn new methods of quitting or reduce nicotine use.
Learn more about the cessation medications and products
Create a Quit Plan designed around their specific needs
Be fully supported through their journey to be a non-smoker or to reduce nicotine use.

For more information on how you can quit smoking, please talk to your family physician.

Mental Health Program
Our Mental Health program offers patients short-term counselling, advocacy, and community referrals with regard to a wide array of issues such as anxiety, depression or any psychosocial stresses. Our clinicians can provide counselling services in individual or family formats, advocate on a patient’s behalf within the health care community to assist and facilitate further support, and provide patients with information on community resources and facilitate access to these resources. For more information, please visit the Mental Health Clinicians Page.

Cognitive Assessment Program – Temporarily Unavailable!!
Early detection is the key in the treatment of those with Mild Cognitive Impairment or Alzheimer’s. Through our Cognitive Testing program, any patient of the Clinic is eligible to be tested. If a patient is exhibiting symptoms that are severe enough to be noticed by themselves or family members that have a negative impact on their day-to-day routine or cause a personality or behaviour change, the family doctor will make a referral to the nurse for memory testing.

Tests are done by a specially trained clinic nurse, one-on-one in a quiet, private setting where confidentiality is ensured. Patients referred are usually tested within 2-4 weeks of the referral with results to the family doctor within a week.

Depending upon the results, the family physician can provide various treatments or drug therapies to help ease or slow down the symptoms of dementia as well as doing blood work or tests to rule out possible causes of dementia such as a head injury, stroke, etc. The physician may also refer the patient for more extensive testing to a memory clinic or geriatricians who specialize in this field. Information is given to caregivers, patients and available resources in the community.

INR (Anticoagulation) Program
If you have been diagnosed with Atrial Fibrillation (‘irregular heartbeat’), have a clotting disorder, or have had a valve replacement, monitoring your international normalized ratio (INR) needs to be monitored regularly to ensure that your medication dosage is safe and effective.

Through our INR program, our Family Health Team pharmacist work together with our physicians to provide a convenient, one-stop monitoring program. The pharmacist uses a finger prick blood test that provides immediate results. From there, they can then adjust a patient’s medication as required, in minutes rather than days, and in a single appointment. The pharmacist also records all patient visits in the patient’s electronic medical record that’s shared with their physician, so that their doctor always knows the status of their treatment.

For more information, visit the INR section on the Peterborough Family Health Team website.