Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to thank you for the hard work you are doing to support your patients in these difficult times. We want to assure you that your Division continues to work to respond to your and your patients’ needs. We are here to support you in this fluid and challenging situation. Here are some updates on steps we have taken so far.
Protecting you, our physician members
One of our immediate steps last week was to take measures to protect you from potential exposure to COVID-19. To this end, we postponed our April 1st town hall meeting and all related strategic planning engagement activities. In addition, all Dine & Learns and other learning series are on hold until the fall.
Telemedicine and Doxy.me
Another obvious solution to avoid exposure while providing care is rapid implementation of telemedicine. As you may have read in the daily update earlier today, the Victoria and South Island Divisions negotiated an 80% discount for the telemedicine platform Doxy.me and the VDFP has created a telemedicine website with a step-by-step guide and more resources to enable a quick start.
COVID-19 page and daily updates
To help you stay on top of updates that are relevant for Victoria family physicians, we created a COVID-19 page on our website and are sending frequent updates summarizing various news items. Please continue to visit Island Health’s Primary Care Package page on their medical staff website, the BCCDC page and Pathways regularly for more updates.
Tell us how we can help you: One-on-one check-in with all members
We want to hear how the Division can help you in this difficult situation. Next week, Division staff will reach out to all members by phone to hear how you are doing and how we may help. Support may include topics like doxy.me and cloud-based phone systems to help your team work remotely.
One central point of contact, Q&A living document
To ensure we can respond to COVID-related requests and questions as quickly as possible and collect ideas you may want to share over the next weeks, we set up a new email covidvictoria@divisionsbc.ca and will share questions and answers that are relevant for all members on our channels.
Virtual meetings
We are currently investigating to what extent committee and working group work can and should proceed, taking into account priorities, member availability, and options to do so in a way that is safe. To safely convene groups, we have built additional capacity for virtual meetings through Zoom and GoToWebinar. If you are engaged in a committee or working group, your committee or working group lead will reach out to you with more details on next steps.
Division staff are working from home
Although the Division office and Board room are closed until further notice, all staff have been enabled to work remotely and are available to help as always.
As usual, you are also most welcome to be in touch with either one of us, as well as with our Executive Director Catriona Park, at victoria@divisionsbc.ca.
Thank you again to all of you for the amazing work you are doing to care for patients.
Co-chairs Drs Katharine McKeen and Tim Troughton