Orléans clinic hit by decrease in patients
An urgent care clinic in Orléans is one of several local fee-for-service health-care clinics faced with the grim prospect of permanent closure as patient flow has been reduced to a trickle during the city’s pandemic lockdown.
“The pandemic has affected everybody, it’s affected us, it’s affected all businesses. It’s impossible to not know someone affected by the pandemic,” said Dr. Raymond Aubin, president and CEO of the Orléans Urgent Care Clinic.
“The social distancing stay-athome directive, people are taking it to heart and they’re doing it well, but it’s also creating some anxiety, some reticence to visit a clinic like ours. People were first saying, ‘We didn’t know you were open,’ or then, ‘We didn’t want to go to a clinic and expose ourselves to the virus.’”
Despite the clinic’s strict screening and sanitizing protocols, Aubin said, “The net result of that is our patient volume has decreased by about two-thirds.”
A recent online survey conducted by the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) attracted responses from about 5,000 doctors, with just over half saying they were laying off staff and 49 per cent responding they were thinking of closing their clinics completely, said OMA president Dr. Sohail Gandhi.
The Orléans clinic launched an online petition that gathered over 3,000 signatures in its first week urging the government to extend relief to clinics like OUCC, and Aubin enlisted the support of Orléans MPP Stephen Blais and Ottawa South MPP John Fraser to bring his file forward to the Ministry of Health.
“We provide unique services — unique in Ottawa, unique to Ontario and I think we have a unique clientele,” Aubin said. “But we’re privately funded on a fee-for-service basis, run by an association of doctors who share expenses, and if our clientele drops by 66 per cent then our income drops by 66 per cent.
“So we normally have five doctors on shift every day of the week and three on weekends, and now we have one during the day, one in the evening and one on weekends with a backup on call.”
Family doctors are also seeing a sharp decline in their patient volume, while at the same time dealing with a glitch in the province’s electronic billing system that will see payments for phone consults deferred for months.
And while family doctors and other fee-for-service clinics are all feeling the same pinch, Aubin said, “This is not your regular walk-in clinic — the OUCC is an extension of the emergency department into the community, and although we have less acuity than the ER, we see everything: from children and babies to advanced age, retirement homes, intake and discharge from group homes, we’re also a point of contact for the Ottawa Carleton Detention Centre and the William E. Hay youth detention centre.”
The clinic will typically treat a variety of injuries, sprains, fractures, lacerations, soft tissue injuries and infections, with services “that would not be offered anywhere else but in the emergency department,” Aubin said. “And we have a threat in that our operating expenses, we’re trying to reduce and mitigate our expenses, but we’re looking at a $40,000 deficit on a monthly basis.”
For the first time in 27 years the clinic is facing closure.
“And post-pandemic we’re going to need these services again,” Aubin said. “Aside from coronavirus, people still need health care in a setting that is safe and secure — we have a triage nurse with protective equipment on, we screen everybody before they’re allowed in, and we have people wait outside (or in their cars) and only bring in one or two people at a time. We have no one in the waiting room and we sanitize every surface after people have come and gone.”
“I think people were really wary of that,” Aubin said. “But also, people are told to stay home, and they stay home. Some businesses are open, though, and we are considered an essential service … people still get injured, workplace injuries still happen.”