<\/p>\n
![\"Cortes](\"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Bldg-1038x576-1.jpg\")
<\/a>Photo of Cortes Medical Clinic courtesy Cortes Community Health Association<\/p><\/div>\n
The Cortes Medical Clinic<\/h2>\n
Iain Law is one of the six doctors<\/a>\u00a0who take turns serving in the Cortes Medical Clinic. He has an established practise in Victoria, which is where he connected to our ZOOM chat.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Cortes Medical Clinic is a full service facility. We provide comprehensive care to anybody on the island. That means we are often the first point of contact for a lot of people with different health issues. We help people manage health issues and also help them navigate through the health care system including specialists and hospital care. Cortes is somewhat unique compared to other family practises in that we also provide emergency care in conjunction with BC Ambulance on the island,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n Dr Law added, \u201cOpioids are a small part of what we do on a day to day basis.\u201d<\/p>\n Do you deal with it every day?<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a clinic, anything can come through the door. Substance abuse, of any kind be it alcohol or drugs, has an impact on a certain percentage of those visits. Underlying substance abuse [sometimes] makes the condition they are coming in for worse, such as alcohol and heart disease or something like that. We are not seeing overdoses coming into the clinic on a rampant basis. You can\u2019t really say it is the opioid crisis, but drug abuse certainly impacts some of the things that come through the clinic,\u201d said\u00a0Bernice McGowan<\/a>, a registered nurse who works in the clinic as a casual nurse.<\/p>\n She qualified this answer, \u201cI don\u2019t see most of the people that come into the clinic.They aren\u2019t necessarily coming in.\u00a0 Many are speaking on the phone and I don\u2019t know what is happening on those phone calls. I\u2019m not looking at their medical records. I don\u2019t have access to a lot of that information, you\u2019d have to talk to the doctor, but I do know there is a substance use\u00a0 impact on some of those clinic visits.\u201d<\/p>\n McGowan also oversees Cortes Island\u2019s home care sector.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say that my home care job is really impacted a lot by substance use issues. To some extent with certain clients, but not in any sense [as] \u2019the opioid crisis,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we see in the clinic is just part of the picture,\u201d explained Dr Law.<\/p>\n He suggested contacting the local British Columbia Ambulance Service, which was not available for comment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe patients we typically see, related to addiction issues, are patients that are concerned about their struggles with addiction and are looking for help. We try our best to connect them the appropriate services and offer to manage them on our own. That sometimes means connecting them with counselling and education around substance abuse. Not everything is on the island, there are addiction services in Campbell River that we work with. Sometimes pharmaceuticals are needed. There are various interventions, including opioid replacement therapy with \u00a0either\u00a0methadone<\/strong>\u00a0or suboxone. We do some of that on the island, but certainly not a lot and not every day,\u201d said Dr Law.<\/p>\n This is the first of two episodes coming out of our interviews.\u00a0 In part two, Bernice McGowan and Dr Iain Law discuss the way the opioid crisis is portrayed in the media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Roy L Hales According to\u00a0a recent report from the BC coroners service, there have been 30 suspected illicit drug overdose deaths in the North Vancouver Island Health Service Delivery area during the first eleven months of 2020.\u00a0Fentanyl was detected in 22 cases. That\u2019s in a\u00a0population of more than 122,000, which probably explains why there…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":30316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[223],"tags":[4641,1048],"radio":[252],"origine":[280,266,231],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30309"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=30309"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=30309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Do you deal with Opioids every day?<\/h2>\n
Seeing part of the picture<\/h2>\n