It’s official!
The grand opening for the Williams Lake Urgent and Primary Care Centre was held today (February 28).
Williams Lake First Nation Chief Willie Sellars began the celebration with drumming followed by speeches from long serving Doctor Glen Fedor and the Mayor Surinderpal Rathor.
Representatives from Interior Health were also on hand including Karen Cooper, Executive Director Clinical Operations for Thompson Cariboo Rural for I H.
Cooper said the opening of this facility is going to make an enormous difference for Williams Lake residents.
“When we’re at our full hours as of Monday, March 3rd, we will have the capacity to to see up to 116 people a day. Even though we are at reduced hours this week we are seeing volumes of the public coming through our doors. We had 7 on our first day, 47 on day 2, and yesterday (Thursday) we had 51.”
Cooper noted that one of those people hadn’t seen a Doctor in over ten years so she feels they are really meeting the needs of maybe an under served public that have held back from having their Health Care needs addressed.
‘We have nurse practitioners, Physicians, a whole team of Health Care providers including nursing, social work, and Indigenous care coordinators.” Cooper said, “What we offer them is that comprehensive holistic team based care to address whatever need has brought them here. We can do blood samples and urine samples here to really be able to help diagnose quickly what the issue might be and that timeliness access to care has really been the principal we’ve been striving to achieve with this site.”
Cooper said as they were planning for this site and reviewing the data of what is coming through the doors at Cariboo Memorial Hospital in the Emergency Department nearly half of the visits were triaged as appropriate for a site like an Urgent Primary Care Centre.
Beginning Monday March 3rd the Centre will be open each day from 9:30 am to 8:30 pm.
The cost is approximately $4 million with 34% coming from the Cariboo Chilcotin Regional Hospital District, and the remainder from the Ministry of Health and the Province of BC.
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