Newborn care partnership fuels learning opportunities

Feature Stories | 16 Oct 2024

Kingston’s Well Baby Care Clinic provides crucial wellness care to infants—and vital learning opportunities to future health professionals.

During the ongoing primary care crisis, Kingston’s Well Baby Care Clinic (WBC) is committed to ensuring local newborns and infants receive comprehensive and preventative care. Responding to the growing regional trend of unattached newborns—last year 22% of babies born at Kingston Health Sciences Centre did not have a primary care provider—the clinic served 151 clients in its first year of operation.

While focusing on wellness care, specialist referrals, milestone screening and delivering immunizations, Well Baby Care Clinic is more than an early health care safety net for infants without a primary care provider. It is also a learning environment where the next generation of health professionals can get hands on experience and gain clinical confidence.

“One experience that stood out [to me] was the amount of patient education done at the Well Baby Care Clinic,” says Sunny Lee, a second-year nurse practitioner student at Queen’s School of Nursing. He completed one of his program’s clinical placement rotations with the Well Baby Care team.

“This was an excellent learning experience for me as I had to ensure I was confident with my knowledge and that I was able to translate this to new and returning parents. Being able to create solutions that meet the babies and parents with the available resources was challenging but rewarding.”

Watch Partnership for Well Baby Care Clinic on YouTube — Watch KCHC's video: "Partnership for Well Baby Care Clinic"

A collaboration between Kingston Community Health Centres, Queen’s School of Nursing, and KFL&A Public Health, Well Baby Care is staffed by nurse practitioners (NPs), public health nurses, physicians, and other health professionals.

As an NP-led clinic, it is an invaluable learning site for students from Queen’s Nurse Practitioner (NP) Primary Health Care program. Under the guidance of attending primary care clinicians, students like Lee gain hands-on experience seeing patients, communicating with parents and participating in consultations; all while benefiting from an interprofessional approach to well-baby care. In addition to hosting NP students, since its launch the clinic has also provided clinical placements to five undergraduate nursing students and offered observerships for 17 undergraduate nursing students and one medical administrative student.

“It is so important that nursing students are exposed to a wide variety of clinical placements,” says Raye McAvoy, a nurse practitioner and preceptor who works at the clinic. “This clinic consistently offers a great learning environment, not only for exposure, but for consistent opportunities to practice skills, build confidence and progress to independence with highly supportive staff and preceptors.”

Exasperated by the pandemic, staffing shortages and environmental factors have sometimes made it challenging to find and facilitate clinical learning opportunities for nursing students in the Kingston area. It’s one of the reasons why in addition to offering primary care access, educational opportunities are a key component of the Well Baby Care Clinic’s operating model.

“We face many challenges in securing NP placements in our region,” says Dr. Roger Pilon, Director of the School of Nursing and project lead for the Well Baby Care Clinic. As a nurse practitioner himself, Dr. Pilon emphasizes that the clinic’s model aligns with Queen’s Health Sciences’ strategic priority of improving community access to care.

“It’s great that together with our partner health organizations, we can respond to community needs while also creating valuable experiential learning opportunities for our Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner students.”

Now in its second year of operation, WBC’s latest program evaluation report highlights a desire to continue to increase interprofessional training opportunities. It is part of the team’s goal to meet evolving community needs while strengthening the region’s broader health care landscape. In the meantime, the clinic is already making a significant impact on the practices of future primary care providers.

“The Well Baby Care Clinic has a team-based approach to care. [This approach] helped me learn about delivering exceptional patient-centred care to families, and to help promote healthy beginnings,” reflects Lee. “I learned a great deal about community resources and the process involved in getting them connected for our clients.”

The Well Baby Care Clinic is one of five KCHC clinical locations and community programs that host QHS students for observerships, practicum placements, and other hands-on learning opportunities. Learners come from programs across the faculty, including Nursing Sciences, Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner, Family Medicine, Psychiatry, Occupational Therapy, and Health Sciences.

From Sept. 1, 2023, to Sept. 24, 2024, 50 QHS learners gained experience with clinical teams that include nurse practitioners, registered nurses, allied health professionals, and physicians. Other KCHC locations include the Street Health Centre, Weller Clinic and Youth Hub clinic. In 2025, clinical placements are also expected to begin at the new Midtown Kingston Health Home.

Newborn care partnership fuels learning opportunities

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