Blacks Harbour named home for New Brunswick’s 12th collaborative care clinic

Blacks Harbour is set to be the 12th community in New Brunswick to get a primary care clinic.

For 25 years the Fundy Health Centre in Blacks Harbour has served the people who call the small coastal town home, and soon it will be able to help even more people in the community.

The province is spending $1.5 million to both upgrade the facility and hire more staff to add to the 18-member team that includes a physician and three nurse practitioners. This will help the Fundy Health Centre become the twelfth collaborative clinic in the province.

“More than 1,100 people coming off the wait list to add to the 4,000 patients that are already attached here, means that everyone in eastern Charlotte is going to be able to call Fundy their primary care home,” says New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt.

The centre currently serves a total of 4,159 patients, providing care such as primary and transitional care services. There are currently 1,138 people on the province’s waitlist in the community, but once the upgrades are complete every person will be able to call the Fundy Health Centre for the bulk of their health needs.

Kate Burkholder has been working at the centre for the past 23 years. She says the collaborative care model is long overdue and will allow staff to work together to provide patients with the best possible care.

“It’s always been a great model and now that we’re really refining it, I think it’s even more so,” she says. “When I started here 23 years ago, it was me by myself and a physician that had semi-retired.”

Horizon has already begun recruitment efforts to bring staff to the clinic once renovations are completed. Some work has already started, with everything expected to be completed within two years.

The fact the centre has pledged to be able to care for all the residents within their community will help save people from making the trip to larger centres like Saint John to get basic care.

“This is a geography that we have been promoting,” says Health Minister, John Dornan. “We would like everybody, like the school system, to say if I live here, I have a family doctor. If I live here, I have a school. If I live here, I have a nurse practitioner.”

This is the first new primary clinic named by the province after the government announced 11 during their first full calendar year in office in 2025. When asked what the status of these 11 clinics are, the premier says they are in different stages.

“We’re looking forward to doing a bit of a report back as we hit the one-year anniversary on each of these 11 clinics to say how it’s going, who’s been added, how many patients have been attached, and what’s left to do,” says Holt. “Because we are moving full steam ahead.”

The province has committed to creating 30 collaborative care teams around the province by 2028.

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