December 29, 2020
To Our Trusted Patients of Davisville Family Practice,
We hope you and your families are all doing well and staying healthy.
We have updated our procedures in the current context of COVID-19. These recommendations are consistent with Public Health and Ontario Medical Association guidelines, which are meant to keep everyone safe and healthy and limit the spread of COVID-19.
The safety of our patients, staff and physicians is of the utmost importance so please take the time to read these policies in their entirety.
1) As usual, please call 911 in case of emergency. If you have a medical issue that requires emergency management, you can/ should present to the emergency department.
2) In keeping with the OMA’s recommendations, we are minimizing in-office appointments. Please be assured we are still here for you to help manage your health care needs. When you call the office about a health concern, you will be offered either a telephone or video conferencing appointment with your physician or another physician at Davisville Family Practice. At this appointment, the physician can decide whether an in-office assessment may be required. For everyone’s safety, it should be the expectation that majority of patients will and can be managed by phone or video conferencing and not brought into the office for assessment. This is the standard across many clinics in the GTA.
For your safety and the safety of others, please DO NOT present to our office without clearance by phone from one of our physicians.
3) In line with Public Health recommendations, we will not be assessing any patients with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the office. These include symptoms such as fever, cough and shortness of breath. We will do a telephone or video assessment for these symptoms with you and help you decide on the next best course of action.
If you do have symptoms and wonder whether you should be screened for COVID-19, please also consider using this very useful self-assessment tool:
4) If coming into the office for an assessment, please wear a mask. We also request that you come alone if possible or that no more than one caregiver accompany any patient. The patient’s caregiver will be screened as well and will only be allowed into the office if symptom free. Please make sure that all contact information of any caregiver is provided at the time of the appointment.
5) We are available by phone during our usual office hours. All messages will be returned, but this may take up to 48 hours as our phone lines are extremely busy at this time. Please do not leave any urgent messages on the office voicemail. We appreciate your patience.
For additional information on COVID -19 please refer to the following helpful links:
We know these are challenging times for everyone. However, the precautions being put in place across our communities are critical. It is imperative that we protect the vulnerable patients in our community as well as our health care system’s ability to respond to those in need. By practicing physical distancing and slowing the spread of the virus, the goal is to keep people safe and minimize the extent to which our health care system is overburdened.
We thank you for your patience and cooperation.
If we all do our part, we will get through this together.
Sincerely,
The Davisville Family Practice Team
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