The great 19th Century American novelist Herman Melville wrote, “Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads and along those sympathetic fibres our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
Identifying our connectedness from both a social and medical perspective is how nurse practitioner Kimberly Rovers and her team at the Live Well Health Clinic on Woolwich Street get results for their patients.
“Our health care system, I feel, is sort of like a silo,” said Rovers. “It’s all about your heart or it’s all about your kidney but really everything is connected.”
Rovers believes that her clinic’s integrated approach to personal and family health care helps her patients balance all the factors that influence their quality of life.
“How we eat and exercise affects hormone production, weight, sleep – everything is all connected,” she said. “So, when we look at all the pieces then we can optimize health.”
She focuses on a five fundamental pieces.
“There are five areas that we can improve,” said Rovers. “There’s reducing stress, exercise, eating well, healthy sleep and proper supplementation. When you do all of those things you can really optimize health.”
Rovers was born in Owen Sound in 1971, the oldest of five sisters and two brothers and is the mother of two sons Matthew, 22, and Michael, 17, and a daughter Katie, 20.
She completed high school in Owen Sound before moving to Ottawa to get her nursing degree. She graduated from the University of Ottawa in 1994 then moved to Buffalo, New York to study at D’Youville College where she completed her masters-of-science degree and received her family nurse practitioner certification.
“I’ve done community nursing,” she said. “That’s how I started. I have never worked in a hospital. I loved community nursing.”
It was her love for community nursing that brought her to Guelph.
“I worked for CCAC (Community Care Access Centre) at some point,” she said. “I did palliative care for a long time, almost 20 years.”
She recognized a demand from many of her patients for a broader system of care.
“I just found that people wanted something more,” said Rovers. “People wanted guidance on how to live better.”
She opened the Live Well Health Clinic in 2016.
“So now I do family practice and integrated medicine,” she said. “I have been interested in integrated medicine for quite some time.”
Integrated medicine is a combination of alternative and allopathic medicine.
“Allopathic or conventional medicine is when you go to your family doctor,” said Rovers. “Integrative medicine is still staying within best practice guidelines and also using alternative supplements to help people be well. It’s helping people make healthy choices.”
Those choices are based on each patient’s individual needs.
“We do blood work, a full history and we talk to them,” she said. “Are they struggling with weight? Are they struggling with sleep? Are they struggling with a lot of fatigue? Some people are diabetic and some people need hormone replacement therapy so we do that and vitamin injections as well. Everybody’s journey to health is different so, it’s not cookie cutter. It’s making an individual plan for each person.”
Rovers and her team that includes patient care nurse Joy Baker and patient care coordinator Amy Smania work together to make each visit to the clinic a pleasant and informative experience.
“I am really proud of the team I have,” said Rovers. “The women I’ve hired are great with people. People are often anxious when they go to the doctor because they are afraid of what they are going to hear. Then you get that white-coat syndrome so their blood pressure goes up. It is really intimidating but, when people are coming here it’s because they want to make change.”
Rovers has continued with her medical studies in order to expand the treatments and plans are underway to move and grow the clinic in the New Year.
“We haven’t confirmed where yet but the destination will be announced on Facebook,” said Rovers. “It is going to be a bigger space. Hopefully, we are going to have a nutritionist with us as well. It will be a lot more accommodating.”