Province opens clinic to care for thousands of patients losing their family doctor in Sault Ste. Marie

About 10,000 patients of the Group Health Centre in Sault Ste. Marie who will lose their family doctor on or after May 31, 2024 will have somewhere to turn for care.

The patients are being de-rostered, losing their family physicians to retirements or resignations in what the president and CEO referred earlier this year as a "perfect storm".

But in an announcement by the Ontario government on May 29, the province said it was putting $2.8 million into a new outpatient clinic at the Group Health Centre called the Access Care Clinic.

President and CEO Lil Silvano says the new clinic, to be led by nurse practitioners, is a positive step to maintaining continuity of health care.

"So it will be by appointment only and it's basically to help them address any urgent and episodic care," she said. "It provides access to chronic disease symptom management. It helps with their prescription maintenance and ongoingreferral management. Again, they will continue to have access to all of the group health centre programs and services."

Silvano saidthe clinic will serve as a bridgein the absence of a primary care provider.

She admits it is temporary and eventually patients will be assigned to primary health care providers as they are recruited, but the funding allows for about two years for that recruitment to take place.

Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Matthew Shoemaker says he's pleased with the development.

"This is really good news in that it avoids a catastrophic loss of service that our community was staring down the barrel at," he said.

Shoemaker said because of this outpatientclinic, patients will continue to have contact with the health care system instead of being lost and their health files closed.

"It allows the group health centre to maintain those records, for those records to be available to the walk-in clinic attendees," said Shoemaker.

"That is a step in the right direction, but it's going to require us continuing to work on the problem to come up with a more long term solution. This buys us time," he said.

The provincial NDP health critic, France Glinas, said she wonders when this clinic will be up and running, considering it takes time to train people to provide the service.

The MPP for Nickel Belt said the Group Health Centre proposed this solution last summer and the last-minute announcement of aclinic caused unnecessary suffering.

"Why did they have to sit on this really well-thought out plan to avoid all of this?" she said. "That was on the minister's desk for 12 months and she answers back today, it is not acceptable.

Second clinic run by two family doctors also approved

Glinas claims the province's delay in approving the solution set back the Group Health Centre'srecruitmentof nurse practitioners who were interested in working there, but went on to take other jobs in the meantime.

"This is not how you respect people in Sault Ste. Marie," said Glinas.

It's not clear when the Access Care Clinic will open its doors

Also in the announcement, Ontario said it had approved a separate clinic with two former family physicians of the Group Health Centre who will take their three thousand patients with them to their new operation, called the Great Lakes Clinic.

Dr. Manjeet Singh and Dr. Kiran Waqas will also operate an after-hours and weekend walk-in.

Dr. Waqas said she hopesto roster more patients in their family practice over the next one to two years.

The Great Lakes Clinic will begin treating people effective June 4th, 2024.