Last spring, Port Elgin lost its main primary health care provider, when Nurse Practitioner Corinna Power moved out of the Horizon-operated Port Elgin and Region Health Centre and over to a new Horizon clinic in Sackville.
But this spring, the Port Elgin clinic is back in action, with a new full time permanent doctor seeing patients in the Horizon facility attached to the Port Elgin Regional School.
The new doctor is Richard Brûlé, who made his way to Port Elgin after working as a doctor in the US, Fredericton, and Ontario.
CHMA caught up with Brûlé at the April launch of the Sackville Hospital Foundation’s 2025 fundraising campaign, which aims to raise $150,000 to help equip the new Tantramar Primary Health Care Centre in Sackville.
Brûlé says things at the clinic have been going well since he started practicing there in mid-January. Initial visits took a little more time since the clinic implemented electronic medical records when he started, but “once the charts are built, the time spent is a lot more efficient,’ says Brûlé.
In addition to serving as a family physician in Port Elgin, Brûlé takes a one week rotation every two months as a hospitalist, looking after patients admitted to the Sackville Memorial Hospital.
Brûlé says one of the reasons his family was attracted to Port Elgin is family connections. His wife’s mother and grandparents are from Port Elgin, says Brûlé, and “she has a few uncles and cousins that live there.” The other thing that attracted him was the salaried position through Horizon.
Brûlé had been living and working as a solo practice in Ontario, which he says is not ideal. “There’s a lot of financial difficulties with it,” says Brule. “There’s just too much that takes me away from primary care.” So when the family learned Horizon had a primary care vacancy at the Port Elgin clinic, “it was a perfect opportunity,” says Brûlé.
“I wanted to come back to being a salary physician dealing only with medicine and and not have to worry about all the business aspects,” says Brûlé.
He says he’s had the usual hurdles in a new workplace. “It took a while for me to figure out how to order things, like just how things work here,” says Brûlé. And now, the goal is to expand the clinic. The previous nurse practitioner had about 800 patients, says Brûlé, and a family physician can typically handle around 1400. “So we are expanding,” says Brûlé. “I’m responsible for the E4M postal code. So there’s about 2000 people in that catchment area.” Brûlé says once there’s an additional nurse practitioner in place, “we might get very close to being able able to service the entire area.”
Despite the geographic catchment area for the clinic, Brûlé says he still has about 50 patients from outside the area, some living close by in Nova Scotia or in surrounding areas.
The Port Elgin Region Health Centre is one of 46 community health centres that will be “undergoing improvements and transformations to increase access and optimize capacity” according to a recent release by the Horizon Health Network.
CHMA reached out to Horizon for an update on plans for the Port Elgin Region Health Centre, including whether or not the network had posted a vacancy for a nurse practitioner to work alongside Brûlé, but the network did not respond.
