Dr. Ashraf Mohamed and team, Stapleford Medical Clinic, Regina

The $10-million Innovation Fund was negotiated as a key component of the 2022-26 agreement. Twenty‑eight medical clinics across Saskatchewan have received support from the Innovation Fund to better meet the needs of their patients and communities. These projects are helping clinics add team members, improve care, and build stronger, physician-led, team‑based care.

The Saskatchewan Medical Association is profiling individual physicians whose Innovation Fund project ideas are driving change in family medicine in Saskatchewan. Featured is Dr. Ashraf Mohamed and the team at the Stapleford Medical Clinic in Regina.

Dr. Ashraf Mohamed, physician lead at Stapleford Medical Clinic in Regina, says the clinic had reached a turning point.

“We were seeing more patients than ever, with increasingly complex needs, and it was becoming clear that the way we were working wasn’t sustainable. We needed to find a better way to care for our patients.”

With support from the Innovation Fund, Stapleford is moving toward a more comprehensive, team-based model grounded in the Patient’s Medical Home model. The clinic is expanding the role of nurses and investing in training, equipment and space to provide more services in-house.

“The Innovation Fund allows us to build the kind of team our patients need. It gives us the ability to match the right provider to the right service, and that makes a huge difference.”

Stapleford Medical Clinic is a large, busy family medicine clinic serving more than 23,000 patients. With that responsibility comes growing demand. The clinic has seen firsthand how gaps in access can affect patient care. Long wait times for appointments and delays in accessing specialized services such as spirometry, diabetic foot care and diagnostic imaging have made it difficult for patients to receive timely, coordinated care.

“We were having to say ‘wait’ far too often.”

“Patients were waiting weeks to see their doctor and months for certain tests. That has a real impact on their health and well-being. And our physicians are trying to do everything. That’s not the best use of our training, and it’s not the best way to deliver care.”

Stapleford is introducing and expanding services including spirometry testing, a dedicated diabetic foot care clinic, and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. These services will be available more frequently and delivered by trained nursing staff, helping reduce wait times and improve continuity of care. The clinic is also enhancing access to diagnostic imaging by extending X-ray hours into evenings and weekends. In addition, clinic staff perform ECG’s, basic wound care, Audiograms, cortisone shots, some vaccinations, B12 shots, wart treatments and minor procedures.

For patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, COPD and heart disease, who make up a significant portion of Stapleford’s population, these changes are expected to have a meaningful impact, for example reducing the number of times they end up in the ER due to diabetic complications. The clinic is trying to obtain a full-time diabetic educator to work with its physicians and its endocrinologist, Dr. N. Hussein.

Many patients of the clinic require ongoing monitoring, education and timely interventions, all of which are difficult to provide within a traditional physician-only model.

“We can’t go back to the old way of working. Patients with complex needs often require more time and more touchpoints. With a team-based approach, we can support them in a way that is more proactive and more effective. When you have a team around you, you realize how much better care can be for patients and for providers.”