Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic one step closer to reality

The North Bay's first Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic took one step closer to reality Friday as the team announced the locations of their clinic.

The clinic, which will be located at 524 Lakeshore Drive in the Lakeshore Plaza at the corner of Marshall Park Drive and Lakeshore Drive, will serve patients in the North Bay area who have no primary health care provider.

The nurse practitioner led clinic slated to open in the summer of 2011 will focus on primary care services, including managing chronic conditions, preventing disease and health promotion for approximately 3,200 people.

In December, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care helped speed up the process by providing funds to the clinic in order to hire an architect and cover the costs to start setting up the clinic.

”We were thrilled to join the Nurse Practitioners to ‘make their place’ and identify the home of the Nurse Practitioner led clinic,” said Monique Smith, MPP for Nipissing.

“This clinic is an important piece in the improvement of health care in our community.”



Mayor Al McDonald echoed Smith noting that being able to provide health care is in the top two priorities companies have when looking to locate in North Bay.

“I’m getting more and more calls about orphaned patients, that is patients without family physicians, there are over 11,000 orphaned patients in our community,” he explains.

“And when we talk about economic development people want to know if they are going to come to North Bay that they have a family physician so as Monique said this clinic here, which is just fabulous for our community, will take in 30 some hundred patients.”

“Which is almost a third of our orphaned patients in the City of North Bay so this is going to go a long ways in helping our situation,” he adds.



"The inaugural board of directors has been working very hard to realize our goal of opening the North Bay NP led clinic this summer. We are so pleased to be sharing information about the location of the clinic with the community. We are one step closer to providing access to primary health care in North Bay," stated Terri MacDougall, Chair of the Board of Directors for the North Bay NP- led clinic.