“This meeting could be the most important meeting that’s happened in St. Paul for a very long time,” said MLA Ray Danyluk at the start of a meeting held in his office on Sept. 1. Around 20 stakeholders met with Danyluk, Dr. Kevin Worry, zone medical director with Alberta Health Services (AHS), and the new St. Therese Healthcare Centre’s surgeon Dr. Iftihar Ahmed to discuss services to consider for the Wellness Centre.
The centre should offer more preventative medicine and “more wellness,” said Danyluk after the meeting. Worry will come back to the group with recommendation of services he believes are important, he added.
“It is about servicing the community, and that’s why the County and the Town got together to start out with,” he said at the meeting. The centre could house services specific to the needs of the local community, he said.
“There absolutely is a vested interest in making sure we have communities working together,” said Worry. AHS does not only intend to improve performance by reducing wait lists and improving access, but by “making sure that we can have more and more of these services provided closer to home for a good number of people.”
While a neurosurgeon in every community would not make sense, AHS can look at a model to provide improved access that is going to be able to provide quality care and is sustainable, said Worry.
“We want to be able to provide general surgery, obstetrics, anesthesiology, psychiatry, pediatrics and internal medicine in communities in these different areas.” Worry said he wants to reallocate money from one area to another area to provide services closer to home.
“When you have an attractive location to start as your base, you have the potential to bring more professionals into the group to go ahead and offer more as a community,” he said, noting that startup costs are an obstacle for some professionals.
“It strengthens the community as a whole but it also brings more and more services into a community. It’s a major step forward and I have to thank a number of the people around the table,” Worry praised.
The centre will be 25,000 square feet, 11,000 of which will be for doctors and medical services. Around 800 square feet of common area could be used for education and another 13,000 square feet could be rented to specialists, said Town CAO Ron Boisvert.
“What we wanted was health and wellness, not just a clinic,” said Town Mayor Glenn Andersen.
Attendees said they would like the centre to provide education materials.
Dentistry could play a part in the Wellness Centre, said Dr. Larry Hodinsky. He said he refers patients to Edmonton and other locations for oral surgery, but asked if the Wellness Centre could provide dentistry services.
From the education side, speech pathology, speech therapy and psychiatric evaluation services are needed, said Darrell Younghans, chairman of St. Paul Education Regional District.
The Wellness Centre will become the centre of St. Paul in five years, predicted Doug Lamb, president of the St. Paul and District Chamber of Commerce.
“If you bring the facilities into that centre with the physicians and make it a preventative medical centre, then I think you will capture everything.”