Thanks to today’s technology, local residents will have more timely access to health care in Chatham.
A Good Doctors Walk-In Clinic opened this week in the Downtown Chatham Centre. It’s located inside the Chatham Centre Pharmacy, which fronts on King Street.
Leo Liao, director of Good Doctors, said the clinic makes use of the Ontario Telemedicine Network, where a doctor is connected to the examination room remotely, and an on-site nurse works with the patient.
“The nurse will take the patient’s medical history and present illness information,” Liao explained.
The doctor then becomes involved, and can ask for specific on site examinations, or even send the patient for outside lab work.
“Connected devices transmit the images to the doctor,” he said. “It’s very much like they (the doctors) are doing it themselves.”
Liao stressed everything the nurses do is within the scope of their practice and procedure.
“It’s like the doctor is looking over the nurse’s shoulder,” he said.
And when it’s time to write a prescription or produce paperwork for the patient to take to a lab, Liao said the doctor does it at his or her end, and the paperwork is printed here at the clinic.
Liao said not every ailment can be treated at the clinic, but added, “95% of the time, we’re able to provide service as good as or better than a visit to the ER,” without the wait time.
And by channeling people to the clinic for non-emergency ailments, the clinic could help cut those wait times somewhat.
The Chatham clinic is Good Doctors’ fourth such endeavour in Ontario. It began in 2015 in Sudbury, then one was added just north of Sudbury and one placed in Sarnia, before turning to Chatham, Liao said.
In fact, the nurses who will work in the local clinic have been training at the Sarnia one.
The clinic will be open Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
