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The Tantramar Primary Health Care Centre is expanding with a new, much larger, location set to open in downtown Sackville in the next 12 to 16 months.
The new clinic will be located on the ground floor of the York Building, which is currently under construction at 24 York Street. The government of New Brunswick announced the roughly 10,000 square foot site last Friday, Feb. 13.
All that extra space means more doctors, nurse practitioners, and other medical staff, which in turn means more people will be provided care and possibly expanded services, said Richard Lemay, Horizon’s director of primary care for the Moncton/Tantramar area.
“So we’re slowly looking to add at least a minimum of two more providers. We would like to at least have a minimum of five full-time providers in that space.”
In this case, providers means either a doctor or a nurse practitioner, while allied professionals include the rest of the staff at the centre.
Though still in the planning stages, Lemay also expects to add at least another three or four of those other staff.
At its current location at 2 Main Street, the clinic onboarded 550 patients last year and sees about 2,200 patients with its three providers—two doctors and a nurse practitioner. How quickly the new spots get filled will depend on recruitment, Lemay said.
“So that will evolve with time depending on recruiting, but for sure we have people interested. We have some doctors interested already to come to Sackville.”
That’s good news for the community, as there are still 977 people on the waitlist for a primary care provider in the region, according to NB Health Link.
And there are likely to be more joining the list in the coming years.
“We also have to keep in mind there could be some of the providers that live in the community that will retire in their years to come,” said Lemay, “so we don’t have those people unattached at the moment but they will become unattached at one point.”
The goal is to allow a smooth transition for those patients to maintain continuous care.
In an interview last April, Lemay said he hoped to have everyone off that waitlist by April of this year, but now that is no longer the case.
“There was movement, people that changed jobs, people that had unexpected leave. So it created a bit of a gap in access and onboarding new patients,” he said. “So we won’t be able to onboard like 900 patients within the next two months for sure, but we’re still onboarding new patients every week.”
He expects those gaps to be filled by fall and onboarding to pick up again thereafter.
In the meantime, Lemay said he continues to be thankful for the ongoing support and collaboration of the community.
“Really it feels great in that sense that we get support from the community, support from governance, support from everybody. But mostly what I’m happy about is being able to give access to anybody that needs access to primary healthcare that doesn’t have it now.”
