years of consistent – mostly one-way – communication with the medical doctors, updating them about the status of a patient. From the time she opened up her practice, Thompson has resolved to do what she can to try and foster a relation-ship with the town’s medical doctors. So whenever she would see a patient in her clinic, she makes sure she sends a note, via fax message, to the patient’s family doctor to keep him or her in the loop about the patient’s care – the diagnoses, treatment plan and whether she believes the patient needs a referral to another specialist. “I did that for many years, but I never knew if there was any response. So I didn’t know how well things were really received,” Thompson says, but she was determined to keep doing the deed – not just as a means to introduce her practice to the medical doctors, but also for her patients as well. “We were tired of having our patients feel like they couldn’t tell their doctors that they were seeing us. It was quite silly, actually.” So she took a few minutes at the end of every day to write her patient notes to the family doctors. Core joined Thompson’s practice two years ago, shortly after graduating from New York Chiropractic College, but she’s very familiar with the clinic and Thompson’s practice of sending notes to the medical doctors about their pa-tients. In fact, Core used to fax those letters to the doctors’ offices years before she even started chiropractic school. Core used to work part-time at Thompson’s chiropractic clinic when she was in high school. “That’s when I kind of “There’s been a general change in collaborative care in medicine and sharing care, working at people’s skillsets.” Drs. Lisa Thompson and Amanda Core, the two chiro-practors from Petrolia Chiropractic, have been engaging in collaborative patient care with the family doctors at Central Lambton Family Health Team over the last three years. “The family health team out here is all about collaborat-ing with different professionals, to really reduce wait times,” says Thompson, pointing out that with family doctors’ busy schedules, it’s important that they are able to confidently refer patients with mechanical low back pain, for example, to allied health practitioners like chiropractors. “We just feel very strongly that we need to work to-gether… There’s no power struggle about who owns the patient,” Thompson adds. got interested in the whole chiropractic field.” It was only about three years ago that Thompson finally got confirmation that her letters were not ending up in the recycling bin. “It was Dr. Al-Dhaher calling my office to congratulate me on a case that I had worked on,” Thompson recalls. It turned out one of Al-Dhaher’s patients came in telling him about the chiropractic care she had received from Thomp-son. Butler was hearing similar things from his patients who have gone to see Thompson. “Not long after Dr. Thompson came to our town and opened up her practice, I noticed a number of my patients reported to me they had gone to her for their back pain,” says Butler, who admits he had reservations about chiro-practic in the early years of his medical practice. “The thing that got to me was the patients were saying (Thompson) spent a long time with them, she took a history of pain, she February 2017 Canadian Chiropractor 19 Patience is virtue Getting referrals from the family doctors has not always been the case for the chiropractors. For Thompson, who started Petrolia Chiropractic 11 years ago, it took many www.canadianchiropractor.ca
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