Increasingly positive results from the personal doctor pilot at Iso Omena

The personal doctor pilot at the Iso Omena health station has been running for about nine months. Four doctors and six nurses are taking part. In contrast to the entrepreneurship-based model with self-employed professionals, the doctors and nurses in this pilot are employees of the Wellbeing Services County. Roughly one in ten clients of the Iso Omena health station were randomly selected into the pilot cohort. Each participating client has a named personal doctor and a named nurse who take overall responsibility for their care.

Doctor Essi Rauhamaa and nurse Veera Lumentaus are participants in the pilot. Their experiences are positive and similar, with both describing how improvements in continuity of care and meaningfulness of work have only strengthened since the early days of the pilot.

Both in-person visits and phone calls have been handled smoothly. “Clients have been pleased when they don’t have to repeat their history or health information every time. We professionals know the patient, and it’s easy to refresh from our own notes where we left off last time,” Lumentaus sums up.

Compared with the team-based model, the personal doctor model has lowered the threshold for seeking care. Rauhamaa notes that some clients decline an in-person appointment because getting to the health station—for example, in the middle of the day—is inconvenient. “In those cases, we handle as much as possible by phone, and with a familiar client a simple check-in call is often sufficient,” she says.

Both describe the work as rewarding: it’s gratifying when a treatment clearly helps, and, on the other hand, problems that persist offer opportunities for learning and professional development.

Rauhamaa adds that the model has improved information flow between specialised healthcare and the Wellbeing Services County. “Nowadays I often receive clinic letters from HUS. The letters function as handoffs between specialised healthcare and our services. They also give us insight into our clients’ treatment and help us secure the best possible follow-up care.”

The professionals partaking in the Iso Omena pilot were initially anxious about the holiday period, when half the team would be on leave in turn. In the end, everything went well. Clients were informed that their named nurse or doctor was away and were advised to get back in touch once their doctor or nurse had returned to work. “We worried in advance about how a request like that would be received, but clients were understanding and happy to reconnect later with a familiar professional,” Lumentaus says. The doctors also set aside time in their own schedules to handle urgent matters for colleagues’ clients who were on leave. If a matter required immediate attention, the client was directed to another nurse or doctor working in the pilot.

The strategy of the Western Uusimaa Wellbeing Services County for 2026–2029 states that every resident should have a named doctor by 2030. The biggest challenge with achieving this goal is physical space. By contrast, so-called sector duties (e.g. maternity/child clinic work and part-time arrangements) have not stood in the way of a functioning personal doctor model, at least based on the Iso Omena pilot.

There are still practical issues to solve as no model or workplace is ever really “finished.”

“The pilot has shown that care structures can be successfully renewed when facilities, systems and information flow support the work,” say Rauhamaa and Lumentaus. Returning to previous ways of working would not make sense to them. They therefore speak with one voice in hoping the personal doctor model will continue beyond the pilot.