As we age, our need to have access to healthcare in the community generally increases. Yet, as our mobility decreases, it gets harder to leave the house and get to a medical clinic. Working as a GP myself, I have seen this first hand. Sure, as a doctor, you try your best along the way to do home visits as much as you can, but it’s never enough.
On the other side of the coin, in Australia, we are fortunate to at least have support to let us live at home safely and independently, by way of home care packages. Cleaners, carers, nurses and many more service providers can all come to a person’s house to help.
And so it dawned on us, many years ago now, that combining primary care with home care would be a really good idea. What if all those staff who see a patient at home, could have a more direct line of communication to that person’s doctor, to really build that team around an elderly person. Those home care staff would then in fact become terrific patient advocates. The potential was there. With the dawn of Telehealth, that potential has been magnified.
It is in that light, that we’re really quite exhilarated to announce that, after many years of hard work getting there, Atticus Health has now been granted a licence to deliver Government funded home care packages and we will be launching this in early 2022. Our home care service will be called Mark & Silvie’s Home Care in memory of the late Mark and Sylvia Gomes, the loving parents of our founder, Dr Floyd Gomes. Mark and Sylvia were both fiercely independent and indeed, loved living in an abode filled with flowers and memories, a place they called their ‘home’.
We consider that it will be a revolutionary step to properly combine primary and home care, in effect, providing that true one stop shop for those who need it and we look forward to making this service principally available to patients of Atticus Health. If you are interested in learning more about our home care service and being on a waiting list to register, please email agedcare@atticushealth.com.au.
Dr Floyd Gomes – Managing Director, Atticus Health
