Three Rivers walk-in clinic opening soon thanks to community support

A community group in Three Rivers is getting ready to open the doors to a new walk-in clinic in the Down East Mall — as soon as local doctors and nurse practitioners sign up to work there. 

This weekend, the volunteer group is asking people to join them in celebrating the progress that has been made — and to chip in a few more dollars — with its Apple a Day fundraiser at a Montague brewery. 

"We've had excellent support from many of the service organizations, businesses and others," said committee member Theresa Redmond.

"Sunday should be a fantastic opportunity, not only to share the news about the clinic, but also to give back to the community through fun activities, and hopefully have donations to support the clinic going forward."

There have been calls for a walk-in clinic in the Kings County community for years, and they've only grown louder with nearly 35,000 names on the province's patient registry, a list of Islanders who are waiting to be assigned a family doctor. 

Meanwhile, staff shortages have meant frequent restrictions to the hours of Kings County Memorial Hospital's emergency department. 

About a year ago, the hospital's foundation decided to form a special volunteer committee to explore setting up a clinic to serve people who don't have access to primary care.

Telemedicine component

The Down East Community Clinic will be ready to open sometime in October, Redmond said. 

"We will have a walk-in clinic with doctors or nurse practitioners," she said. 

"We will have a telemedicine cart with various peripherals, capacity for photos, blood pressure, all of those sorts of things that could be uploaded to have patients access Maple."

Maple is the online virtual health platform the P.E.I. government is using to help provide care for people until they can be assigned to family doctors.

Redmond said the telemedicine aspect of the clinic will be particularly useful for helping residents access Maple. 

"Certainly in Kings County, there's extremely weak cellphone access, so there's dropped calls. [When] people try to get in touch with Maple, they can't," she said. 

"There's also a segment of the population that isn't as comfortable with computers, and so they need a little help maybe logging on, registering and explaining their situation to the Maple folks."

'Fresh and clean and new'

Redmond said the plan is to staff the walk-in clinic with health-care providers who are working in the Three Rivers area. 

"We will be speaking to the various doctors and nurse practitioners here in the region to see who'd be available to provide part-time services on top of their regular practice," she said. "That's not an uncommon thing in P.E.I., but it's new to this area."

Health P.E.I. plans to lease half of the space to run an appointment-based primary-care clinic, specifically for people without a family doctor or nurse practitioner. A similar model has been in operation for a while now at the Polyclinic in Charlottetown. 

"Early indication is that there will be doctors that will be interested, and plus it's a really beautiful space, fresh and clean and new," Redmond said. "I think it'll attract people who just want to have this kind of environment to meet with the public and provide ... much-needed services in the area."

Committee member Ray Brow said the mall space is only temporary because there are plans to move the clinic.

"The walk-in portion of the clinic will be moving to a nearby pharmacy in about nine months' time," he said.

"This clinic will probably become part of Health P.E.I. It's all been designed to Health P.E.I. standards and they have a right of first refusal to take over this space when we leave."

The long-term goal is to have a new hospital in Kings County, said Brow. Plans for that were announced in the province's 2021 capital budget, with $13.3 million set aside over five years for planning.  

"That's a dream. We know it's coming, but it's at the end of this decade, and we hope to participate in that process as well," he said.

"We've not had any meetings with Health P.E.I. about what their intentions are, so it is expected that they will be incorporating some members of our group into the planning stages."

Brow hopes what the committee was able to achieve in Three Rivers will inspire other Island communities looking for more access to health care. 

"We know that the community around us — and I'm talking about all of eastern P.E.I., from Stratford to East Point — they're behind this initiative," he said. 

"You just have to band together and go for it."

In a statement to CBC News, Health P.E.I. confirmed it has been working with committee members to develop the Down East Community Clinic space. 

"Health P.E.I.'s Primary Care Access Clinic in Montague will move to this site to continue to provide in-person appointments to patients without a primary-care provider who have been referred from the Unaffiliated Virtual Care (UVC) program through Maple," the statement said.

"A multi-site patient medical home opened in Montague within the last six months. Montague is slated to have a new community health centre, and Health P.E.I. has done several rounds of planning to inform the redevelopment of the KCMH."