Apple Hills Medical Associates is now part of Summerville Family Health Team.
Apple Hills Medical Associates has always delivered primary care. Primary care is your first point of contact with a doctor or a health care team and it includes but is not limited to disease management and prevention, disease cure, rehabilitation, palliative care and health promotion. Apple Hills physicians have delivered your babies, made housecalls, cared for you in the hospital, provided palliative care and been an integral part of the Applewood community for more than 40 years. We continue to provide those services but, by joining the Summerville Family Health Team, we are able to build on this foundation by bringing additional health care professionals together to organize care in new ways and complement the skills of other health care providers. The Summerville Family Health Team is an approach to primary health care that brings together different health care providers to co-ordinate the best possible care for you – the AHMA patient.
Family Health Teams were designed by the Ministry of Health (Ontario) to give doctors support from other complementary professionals.
Our Summerville Family Health Team consists of nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, a dietician, a psychiatrist and psychologists, a health promotion expert and a pharmacist working collaboratively with AHMA physicians to ensure that you receive the very best care, when you need it, as close to home as possible.
Apple Hills is now one of five patient centred “pods” where you will continue to have access to your physician during our office hours. Now, though, we can provide access to those other health care professionals within our Family Health Team. As we have been for more than 40 years, we are still open during extended evening and weekend hours for urgent problems. If you see another doctor or health care provider in the Summerville Family Health Team for treatment, your own doctor here at AHMA will receive documentation about the nature of your problem so that he will always be up-to date about your medical condition. We still provide after office hours service and you are able to contact the Telephone Health Advisory Service after hours where a registered nurse will provide advice about your urgent health care concerns. If you do call the Telephone Health Advisory Service, with your permission, your doctor will receive a written summary of your call the next day, so that your AHMA physician is informed of the nature of your problem and the advice you received.
By joining Summerville Family Health Team, we have been able to implement electronic medical records and improved electronic communication with Ontario’s private laboratories and local hospitals. This allows us to review your results much more quickly than before, communicate with other physicians and access your records faster and more efficiently.
In spite of all of these changes, we remain Apple Hills Medical Associates – your local, community based family doctors.
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