Collaborating for excellence in urological care

With Dr. Richard Baverstock, one of the owners of vesia:

Given burnout, and the struggling healthcare system, what do you see about the value of recognition in the physician community?

I think burnout is a huge piece of medicine right now. You hear about it, especially coming out of the pandemic. Specifically with regards to our team, burnout is probably minimized because we’re able to share the care of people. There’s no point where somebody feels like the absolute most responsible provider. And so, if a patient is seen by the family physician at first, and they want to discuss one of the complexities of the case, they can discuss it with one of the specialists. If they want to share the care with one of the nurses, they’re able to share the care for say, catheter teaching, and then also with physiotherapy. So at that time, we’re able to share the care throughout, and I think from a team point of view, that’s a big piece of preventing burnout.

Tell me about the value of your work to the community?

I think this provides a tremendous benefit to the community because typically a lot of the types of patients that we might see in the Alberta Bladder Centre of vesia would not have typically been seen. And I give an example of say, women with recurrent urinary tract infections. Most urologists, to be honest, are too busy treating prostate disease, or stone disease, to be able to accept these types of referrals.

And we discovered that this is a group of people that really need to be provided care. And the medical community was searching for a place to send these people, and so we developed our team-based approach, so that groups of patients that were otherwise neglected or just didn’t have access in the system, have been able to find a home here. And that would be patients in wheelchairs, patients that maybe have to learn how to catheterize themselves, recurrent urinary tract infections, even some conditions such as pelvic pain, which are hard to explain and often not surgical patients.

And so the urology community focuses a lot on surgical patients, and that was really one of the things that sparked us to create the Bladder Centre.

What do you love about the work you do?

There are lots of things that I love about urology. As a specialty, it’s a bit of a black box, and most people would say, “What is urology?” And I’ll say, “Well, one day you’re almost certainly going to meet a urologist.” And it doesn’t matter whether you’re riding in a golf cart with somebody or sitting next to somebody on the airplane. Very quickly the conversation changes to say, “Hey, can I ask you a question?” And that’s because we really do have an idea of the entire urinary system from the kidneys right down to the—I’m going to say— tip of the penis. And it really impacts a lot of people.

What is a challenge you and your team are facing when working to advance patient care, and how are you overcoming it?

I think if you put that question to many Canadian physicians, they would list off a whole bunch of struggles that they have. We don’t have enough surgical time per se or we don’t have enough procedure time. Basically, there’s too many patients for not enough physicians to be seen. But the beauty of the Bladder Centre, as we constructed it, is that I don’t have to see everybody because it may be much more appropriate for a family physician to see a person and only way down the road (they) see the specialist. We can still share care along the way.

If somebody has a suprapubic tube and they’re living in a care home and there’s a problem with that tube, the most appropriate provider might be our nurse. I can oversee the work that (they) do, but those are the challenges that many physicians would feel. hen we set up the Bladder Centre years ago, we felt our mission was to get the patient to the most appropriate provider in the fastest possible time. Maybe that’s a physiotherapist, maybe that’s a nurse, maybe that’s a family physician or maybe truthfully it is a specialist in surgery, like myself.