Misericordia losing its urgent care status

Misericordia losing its urgent care status Jon Hendricks reports on the planned closure of Misericordia’s urgent care centre this fall.

Debbie Wall calls herself an accident prone dog lover. Those two qualities have occasionally landed her in trouble.

"Most recently was taking a nasty fall on some nasty ice!" said Wall.

Her wrist was injured, so she later walked to the nearby Misericordia Health Centre for treatment. But she worries what might happen if she gets hurt again.

As part of the WRHA's planned consolidation of health centres, Misericordia won't be an urgent care centre anymore. Instead, patients like Wall will have to go to Health Sciences Centre for treatment.

"If there happened to be taxis lined up, and I happened to have money, I guess I would hop in one and go there."

But some of the doctors from Misericordia worry about what could happen to the patients who can't afford to hop in a cab.

"If people feel there's no viable alternative for health care, they just won't get it," said Dr. Cal Bergen. "And the implications of that both for their personal health, and also for the system are significant."

So the physicians have penned an open letter to Manitoba's Minister of Health Kelvin Goertzen, urging him to reconsider and reverse the planned closure.

"It is difficult to understand the rationale for the decision to close Misericordia urgent care. In our opinion, there is certainly no patient care justification for this closure," they write. "This closure decision does not in any way serve the community immediately surrounding our facility, it penalizes a centre that consistently operates at an exceedingly high level of efficiency and patient satisfaction."

The WRHA says it is willing to reconsider the decision to shut down the urgent care centre. However, it says to date there has been nothing that leads them to believe that the fundamental components of the plan aren't the right way to go.

"We don't believe that there will be patients that are in any way harmed by the reduction of these closures," said Dr. Brock Wright, the WRHA chief medical officer.

The WRHA says procedures developed to help vulnerable patients at HSC will be applied to Misericordia patients too. And if patients show up at Misericordia after its urgent care centre closes?

"I imagine that those patients will have an ambulance called for them, and have them brought to HSC," said Dr. John Sokal, HSC’s adult emergency medical director.

Final details on the specifics of the plan are still being worked out. But the WRHA said it is targeting the fall of 2017 for the closure of the Misericordia urgent care centre.