With Canadian provinces easing restrictions surrounding COVID-19, many pt Health clinics across the country have resumed in-clinic care.
We’ve implemented a variety of in-clinic measures to ensure the health and safety of both our clients and our team. These include: physical distancing, restricting the number of individuals in our clinics, mandatory PPE, stringent cleaning guidelines, and ensuring proper training for and adherence of these measures by our team.
We encourage our clients to also continue using virtual care whenever possible. Virtual care allows us to provide high quality and effective care to our patients from the comfort of their home. It allows us to educate, provide and progress exercises, advance your treatment and most importantly, to pull back the curtains on your environment. We can more easily recognize the challenges of a work, home or play environment and offer advice to better equip you to resolve or work with these challenges.
Hybrid Care – Combining virtual and in-clinic appointments
In many instances, best practice and our regulatory colleges are calling for a combination of these two delivery models. We are referring to our new delivery model of in-clinic care combined with virtual care, as “hybrid care.” Hybrid care offers clients varying options and provides our clinicians opportunities previously unavailable to us.
For instance, let’s say you are coming into one of our clinics for an in-clinic evaluation with a physiotherapist for a lower back injury. Your physiotherapist can complete your evaluation, develop a personalized treatment plan, then schedule virtual appointments with you to follow your progress over the next few weeks. If you experience an exacerbation and require further in-clinic care, or if you require modalities not available through virtual care, your physiotherapist can cancel a virtual appointment and reschedule it as an in-clinic appointment.
Client feedback on our hybrid care model has been overwhelmingly positive. The benefits of hybrid care include, but are not limited to:
- Increasing the flexibility for scheduling
- Allowing an opportunity for clinicians to gain a first-hand experience of a client’s ergonomics, environment, etc.
- Reducing the need for clients to leave work or home or taking time to drive to and from appointments
- Avoiding child-care needs
- Allowing opportunities for those in remote locations, on vacation within the province, transportation issues or driving anxieties to access care
- Allowing for the sharing of online documents and other useful materials to better educate our clients
- Allowing greater access to multidisciplinary teams
If you remain uncertain about the use of video conference technology and our virtual care services, we encourage you to contact a pt Health clinic representative and allow our team to address your concerns. For further information about virtual care options, we ask that you explore our introduction video, or turn to this useful article.
For further guidance on Hybrid Care or to schedule an appointment find a pt Health clinic closest to you, or book online to consult a pt Health clinician.
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