New clinics create home for 'orphan patients' in Huron-Perth

As many as 20,000 people in Huron and Perth Counties don’t have a family physician. However, as of two weeks ago, they now have a place to go for primary healthcare other than the closest Emergency Department.

“This is really a step in the right direction to keep people from having to go to emergency departments, or drive to walk in clinics in the bigger centers. It's really far away from home for something that really you should be able to get close to home,” said Robin Spence-Haffner, executive director of the Listowel-Wingham Family Health Team.

As of early November, Huron-Perth now has six Unattached Care Clinics (UCCs) where people without family doctors can go to for everything from sore throats to surgery follow-up.

The goal is to provide care to those that need it and keep people from using area Emergency Departments for ailments that don’t require immediate action.

“Lots of routine cancer screening, booking their mammograms, getting them in for colon cancer prevention, pap tests, those kinds of things. Routine blood work. And through those visits, we've been catching lots of hyperlipidemia, lots of high blood pressures. So those things, once we get on top of it, we can prevent further issues down the road like heart attacks and strokes. We've diagnosed some diabetes and got people on treatment. So, some really important work has been happening,” said Julie Murtha, one of the nurse practitioners working out of the Listowel Unattached Care Clinic.]

Unattached Care Clinic in Listowel on Nov. 19, 2024. (Scott Miller/CTV News London)

“We want to see people when they're just starting to have an issue, not when they're ending up in the Emergency Department because it's become a crisis. It could be things like a prescription renewal where people just don't have another options, so they end up going to emerg. But really, they just need some care from either a nurse or a nurse practitioner to help them,” said Spence-Haffner.

The new UCCs were created exclusively by the Huron-Perth and Area Ontario Family Health Team, funded by a $110 million investment by the government to connect over 320,000 people without family doctors to primary care in Ontario.

In Huron-Perth, they’ve added two new Nurse Practitioners with their portion of that funding and used existing staff to cover the six new clinics.

As of right now, the government has only provided enough funding to run these kinds of clinics for the next year. But officials in Huron-Perth are more than hopeful that that funding will continue and so can these clinics.

“I'd love to see it continue and expand. And I think our region has done a really good job of all the teams using what we already have in our infrastructure and in our teams, all the skills that we already have and just leveraging that to provide this unique care. So I hope that continues and grows,” said Murtha.

“We'd really like it to become part of the system from here on, on a long-term basis, because it really does fill a gap,” said Spence-Haffner.

The Unattached Care Clinic’s are not walk-in clinics, as appointments are required. And if you have a family doctor in Ontario, the UCC is not for you either, said Spence-Haffner.

For a list of UCC clinics and contact information in Huron-Perth, you can visit their website.