The B.C. government says people in the Ashcroft area will have increased access to team-based health care with the opening of a new urgent and primary care centre (UPCC) today.
It is located at the site of the Ashcroft Hospital & Community Health Care Centre on the Ash-Cache Creek Highway.
“A new UPCC in Ashcroft will offer people increased access to the health care they need, when they need it,” Health Minister, Adrian Dix, said, in a statement.
“With the support of local health-care teams and through community collaboration, we’re strengthening primary care services throughout the province. In Ashcroft, this means that more people can access same-day, everyday health care.”
Speaking on the NL Noon Report, Ashcroft Mayor, Barbara Roden, says this new facility will ease a lot of the uncertainty around healthcare in the area.
“We’ve been talking about it for a long time. I have a tiny idea of how difficult it was to pull all this together and all the moving pieces, but to have it actually finally opened is just a wonderful feeling of relief that it is here,” Roden said.
“In talking with Interior Health, it is only going to get better because they will be adding more services as it becomes more established.”
Roden also says she has been told by Interior Health that there will be enough staff to run this facility, which will be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week.
“It is going to be staffed by nurses to start but we are going to expand the services,” Roden added. “We will be having additional healthcare staff there with other degrees of training.”
“The model of having it open seven days a week, twelve hours a day, the staffing model for that is much, much, much more attractive than trying to staff an emergency department which is open Friday evenings, and then Saturday and Sunday.”
The government says among the first things the UPCC will do as it gradually opens is connect patients without a primary care provider to a family doctor or nurse practitioner.
It also says there will be urgent care available for people with non-life-threatening conditions like cuts, sprains, a high fever, and minor infections who need to see a health-care provider within 12 to 24 hours but do not require an emergency department.
“So if you fall off a ladder because you’re cleaning your gutters, and you think you sprained your wrist, you can go to the UPCC,” Roden said. “You don’t have to go in an ambulance.”
“It is not a walk in clinic but if you have an emergent issue, you can go there and they will see you. If you can be treated here in Ashcroft by a healthcare person, you will be treated here in Ashcroft and you will go home. You will not have to go elsewhere.”
She noted though that people with more serious health concerns – like a heart attack – will be taken to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops as it “has the equipment and the staff to handle something of that magnitude.”
The Ashcroft UPCC will be owned and operated by Interior Health, with president and CEO Susan Brown calling it a “first of its kind…to stabilize rural health care with urgent primary care 12 hours per day close to home.”
“I am also impressed with the recruitment of staff to support rural care; it indicates to me the passion health-care staff have for team-based rural medicine,” Brown added, in a statement.
In addition to diagnosis and treatment for minor illnesses, the government says people will also have access to harm-reduction supplies and education, reproductive care, vaccinations and injections, early cancer detection, guideline-based chronic disease management, and co-ordination of services, referrals to community services, pre- and post-surgical care, and ongoing monitoring, including of medication.
The Ashcroft Family Medical Clinic, also located at 700 Ash-Cache Creek Highway, is separate from the UPCC, and will remain open on weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
– With files from Paul James
