About 60 people gathered in the atrium of the Sackville Memorial Hospital on Thursday to kick off the annual fundraising campaign for the Sackville Hospital Foundation, which this year is entitled “Collaborative Care is Coming”.
This year’s campaign is a pivot for the foundation. Instead of raising money for equipment or facilities in the Sackville hospital, the campaign has its sights set on purchasing equipment for the Tantramar Primary Health Care Centre across the parking lot from the hospital.
The campaign aims to raise $150,000 for the purchase of additional electric examination tables, a wheelchair scale, a tympanogram for examining the ear drum, a bladder scanner, and an automated device for point-of-care urinalysis testing.
The Tantramar Primary Health Care Centre was launched by Horizon Health Network in September 2023 to help take on patients orphaned by a series of doctor retirements in the area that summer. It was a slow start, running on a handful of part-time primary care providers and admin staff for the first year of operations.
But that changed by the end of 2024, says Richard Lemay, Horizon’s director of primary care. There are now three primary care providers working at the clinic, and a collection of other allied health professionals seeing patients.
Lemay was in Sackville last week to show donors around the clinic’s expanding space in the Tantramar Health Centre, a facility that according to hospital foundation chair Bill Evans was originally built and operated by the foundation. The facility is now privately owned, and leases space to Horizon as well as an optometrist and foot care specialist.
Lemay says there are about 1650 patients currently registered at the clinic, and “it grows by about 20 to 30 more new patients every week.”
With the current staff complement, the total number of patients could hit between 2500 and 3000 patients, says Lemay. “We’re still growing,” he says. “We’ll be like that for a while.”
Sackville resident Janet Hammock was in the original cohort of patients for the primary care clinic, and told the crowd gathered last week about her experience signing up for a clinic which “barely existed” at the time, and how it’s grown to be “a smoothly running, collaborative team based care model.”
“I believe that equal access to health care is a right of every Canadian,” said Hammock, “so I’m trying to do all that I can to support the growth of this new centre until its doors are open to everyone in Tantramar who seeks medical care.”
The clinic has two full-time nurse practitioners and one doctor working four days a week, and Lemay says the long term plan is to see “at least four or five,” which means the number of patients attached to the clinic could grow to 5,000.
“But space is a bit of a limitation,” says Lemay. There’s also the challenge of handling future retirements. “We want to have a succession plan for them to absorb patients as we go,” says Lemay, “and then to have a way to gradually retire.”
Lemay says Horizon is trying to partner with existing primary care physicians in the community to complement their work. He says the Horizon clinic has made its part-time licensed counselling therapist available to patients of local doctors.
“We’ve opened up that service to our group of three physicians in the community,” says Lemay. “It’s that concept of, how do we all work together for all the patients of the community? So we’re trying to build those bridges.”
Sackville Hospital Foundation campaign chair Bill Carroll says that this year’s focus on equipment for Horizon’s primary care clinic will not change the long term direction of the foundation to supplement resources at the hospital.
“We’re here to help the community,” says Carroll. “Horizon does wonderful things for us. I mean, they’re keeping our hospital open, they’re bringing good doctors in, but the foundation does other things.”
“We contribute ‘icing on the cake’ items for the hospital, and this year, we’re doing ‘icing on the cake’ items for the Health Care Centre,” says Carroll. “We’re also funding education grants to make sure that we bring medical people into our community… Those are things that we as a community need to bring together.”
More information about the campaign is available at smhf.ca.
