By Dan Laxer
The Suburban
It took some time to get DocTocToc rolling. But since July the mobile pediatric clinic has been providing low-income families who have children up to five years old with primary pediatric care.
The name is a play on words with the French expression “toc toc toc,” which is, of course, “knock knock knock” in English, and calls to mind the days when doctors made house calls. It may also remind younger parents of the TV show Toc Toc Toc, which ran on Radio Canada and Télé-Québec.
The clinic is a bus-turned-clinic with an examination room, an office, a bathroom, and a seating area. It travels throughout three – soon-to-be-four – boroughs seeing patients of up to five years old who are not being served by health and social services.
The project started to take shape in 2017, the brainchild of Montreal Children’s Hospital pediatrician Dr. Rislaine Benkelfat and Jean-Philippe Couture, a financial analyst specialized in public funding for nonprofit organizations.
The bus was inaugurated last March, started operations with the first test clinics in April, and then the official launch of the clinics on a regular basis ramping up in July.
Benkelfat is a tertiary care pediatrician, which is specialized care, meaning she sees patients with more complex issues. But she and her colleagues would also see primary care patients who would show up at the emergency room because they didn’t know where else to go, or because they couldn’t get access to a healthcare professional.
She would often treat kids “who presented late for issues that could have been dealt with way earlier and with probably better outcomes had they been known ahead.”
The idea behind DocTocToc is to democratize healthcare for young children, to break down the barriers to healthcare.
Benkelfat explains that DocTocToc meets families in the community to answer their basic needs, and then refers them to the healthcare professionals who can best meet their needs.
There are no doctors onboard the DocTocToc bus. There are nurses who do clinical assessments on a walk-in basis for both medical and psycho-social issues, and then help orient families to the appropriate resources in the community. They then help them navigate the system, even giving them the tools they need, and empowering them to seek health services on their own down the road.
At some point they will even start to offer vaccinations.
And DocTocToc comes to the patients. For the time being they’ve been rolling into Montreal-Nord, St. Laurent, and Ahuntsic, and soon they’ll include Cartierville. They find the patients rather than the patients having to seek them out, relying on their partners in community organizations who work with families who are newcomers, for example. They may also participate in community events and activities to let communities know that they are there. And potential patients know that the DocTocToc bus will be at a specific spot on a specific day.
Benkelfat says they may branch out into other boroughs, like CDN-NDG, one day. “Right now, we’re concentrating on consolidating what we’re doing in the northern part of Montreal,” she says, adding that at some point DocTocToc may branch out, or even inspire others to follow in the footsteps. Or their tire tracks.
Benkelfat says that the government has generally been supportive of DocTocToc as the model evolved. But that support, she says, has not been financial. n