Improving health care focus of talk
Dr. AJ the featured speaker at the Digby Area Health Coalition’s AGM
Doctor Ajantha Jayabarathan – or Dr. AJ as she’s better known – spoke at the Digby Area Health Coalition’s annual general meeting on May 25 and provided tips for improving health care and ways communities can achieve this together.
She provided statistics of doctor’s ages in Nova Scotia. There are presently 112 doctors in the province who are 71 years old or older. There are 140 doctors who are 66-70 years old and 265 doctors in the age group of 61-65.
“I think this gives you an opportunity to realize that this resource is going to be dwindling and so we have to do things differently,” she said. “I think every one of us is going to have to step up to use this resource wisely.”
Dr. AJ has been using electronic medical records since 2003. She believes this technology has helped her maintain organization with her many patients.
My HealthNS is an online system that patients can access online to view their health care informa- tion electronically. Dr. AJ thinks in the future technology may benefit health care more. In other provinces and countries around the world, doctors are using video calls to contact their patients who can’t make it to the doctor’s office.
Patients can then record the call to save for personal use. This way it is easier to remember everything discussed in the appointment.
“That will be the way of the future,” she said.
Dr. AJ heard Dr. Jeffery Brenner speak in Philadelphia about a system called a geographic information system (GIS).
This inspired her to track how far away her patients were travelling to visit her and what types of diseases they have. She practises in Halifax and patients travel to see her from rural areas. When she asks a patient to do something but they don’t carry it out, now she understands it could be because the services she’s talking about aren’t available in rural areas.
“It never occurred to me until I started to think about this, that they probably don’t have access to a lot of what I was talking about,” she said.
For example, Dr. AJ can track pa- tients with diabetes and then verify where the closest diabetes education centre is to them.
“It started to educate me about the world my patients live in,” she told the crowd.
There is money and grants available for communities to partner with Dalhousie University to find out some of the community-based health-care statistics for the Digby area.
Dr. AJ acknowledged there are shortages of health-care services in the area but said as a community we can work together to improvise for the time being.
“These shortages we are facing have created adverse conditions, but they offer us opportunities to innovate and consider entirely different ways to approach what we need,” she said.
MAKING IMPROVEMENTS
What can you do to improve your health and your communities’ health?
• Dr. AJ suggests taking part in healthy amounts of physical activity. By wearing an electronic watch that helps track your physical activity, like a FitBit, you can determine for yourself if you are maintaining a healthy lifestyle. If not, this could be a leading problem of your health.
• She suggests continuing and increasing community activities where people of all ages can take part in physical activity together.
• Look at the food sources in the community.
• Southwest Nova Scotia has high-to-moderate levels of ticks. As a community, she suggests joining together and offering communityhelp clinics for educating about ticks and tick removals. This way, it saves a trip to a doctor
“There might be innovative ways by which you can look at your geography and develop solutions,” she said.
These were just a few of the suggestions Dr. AJ suggested working towards as a community.
“We do have a choice and that choice is to not be victims,” she said. “Revolution and change can come only from us. From you and me. It is not going to come from the government or a health organization or anything that is not at the grass roots,” said Dr. AJ.