There's a full slate of initiatives planned for the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority for the coming months. CEO Ron Van Denakker says there's no shortage of initiatives on the horizon, ranging from the expansion of home care coordination, to seeking approval for more personal care beds.

One aspect Van Denakker's particularly excited about is the 'My Health Team' initiative, which aims to tie community members with a health care team. He explains the move would see a team assigned to a geographic location, to help provide a variety of services to consumers in the area.

"With this initiative comes a significant amount of new funding for the shared care model, for resources like dieticians, primary health care nursing, and mental health, to really round out the services. We've been working hard to create capacity, in other words demonstrating to our funders we have the ability to roll this out successfully in collaboration with fee for services doctors."

Van Denakker's hoping they'll be able to put one or two of the teams in place throughout 2016, which he says will have a significant impact on health care in the region.

Another measure being taken by the IERHA focuses on improving rural EMS Service. Van Denakker says he's cautiously optimistic their application for increased EMS services will be approved, noting that would play a vital role in improving the region's health care.

"That's really good because in rural Manitoba, we rely very heavily on all of our staff, but we certainly rely on EMS. It's really good care when you need it. When that episodic care that's really dangerous happens, you need that treatment to happen at the front door. Our highly skilled paramedics are a really important part of the health care team."

Doctor recruitment and retention has been a hot topic for the RHA over the last year, and Van Denakker anticipates they could turn the corner in 2016. He says they're taking a bit of a different approach, by using a 'doctors recruiting doctors' type strategy.

"Dr. Thiessen has done an amazing job building relationships with many of the doctors in the region to the extent they're engaging with us to develop these strategies. That way, we're not doing it alone because the reality is doctors do recruit doctors, and we're starting to see that already."

He says other upcoming highlights will be the creation of a new personal care home in Lac du Bonnet going to tender, as well as work in increase the number of personal care beds.