A community leader in the Whitbourne area calls the conversion of their health clinic to a facility without an emergency room an insult.
It has been difficult recruiting health professionals for the the Newhook Clinic so the ER is closed as often as it is open. Government plans to close that aspect of ER for good and use the site for treatment of urgent, but not emergent, cases. Even that service will be intermittent.
Andrew Pretty, chair of the local service district of Dildo, says the establishment of an “urgent care centre” is nothing more than a glorified nurse with a first aid kit.
Patients requiring emergency will have to go to either Placentia, Carbonear or St. John’s—each about an hour away. Pretty says things are also difficult in those emergency rooms. He knows of one person who had to wait 22 hours at Carbonear General.
He says people with chest pain left the ER in Carbonear—that’s how bad things are. Closing the ER in Whitbourne only puts more pressure on other health facilities.
