Niagara Health to open third test centre
COVID-19 assessment facility in Welland will start testing Monday
Niagara Health has added a third COVID-19 assessment centre, helping cope with the thousands of people being tested for the virus while bringing the service closer to home for south Niagara residents.
The new testing centre will be opened Monday at the Welland hospital, bolstering existing testing facilities running in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, said Dr. Derek McNally, executive vice-president for clinical services and chief nursing executive.
“We want to meet the needs of our entire community that Niagara Health serves. We didn’t have a testing centre around that area, and we were getting requests from residents,” McNally said.
Meanwhile, he said, the numbers of patients visiting COVID-19 test centres has increased significantly in the weeks since the provincial government allowed people to get tested without a referral.
Since the start of June, he said, more than 4,000 people have visited existing testing centres — including more than 1,000 since Monday this week.
Since opening in March, nearly 17,000 people have been tested by teams of six to nine people at the two centres, including nurses working with physicians or nurse practitioners.
“There are other staff, corporate support services staff — the people who do the registrations and compile the charts and do all the statistics and all of that,” McNally said. “But for actual direct care, it’s two to three people per team.”
While the workload can seem overwhelming, he said, the staff have been more than up to the challenge.
“The teams that we have in those assessment centres are absolutely amazing,” McNally said. “They are very patientcentred, patient-focused. It’s scary for some people to come in for that test, and they’re fantastic, those teams that we have.”
Meanwhile, he said, the teams at the test centres are placing themselves at a higher risk of being exposed to the virus.
“They’re sometimes the first point of health care contact with a potential case,” McNally said.
He said the new test centre will be located in the Welland hospital’s auditorium, accessible from a dedicated parking spot that can be accessed from MacLean Place off of Plymouth Road. To start, McNally said, the Welland hospital assessment centre will run Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., “and we’ll see how it goes from there.”
The assessment centres in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls will continue to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., from Monday to Sunday.
Although the hospitals will “never turn away a walk-in” at test centres, he said, it’s much more efficient and less timeconsuming for people to call 905-378-4647, ext. 42819, in advance and make an appointment.
“Basically, they’ll be in and out,” he said. “You arrive, you’re swabbed and you’re out again.”
In comparison, McNally said, walk-in patients “have to go through a whole process and wait in their cars until their registration has been processed, and wait for the team to call them in.”
He said people wanting to be tested can begin calling immediately to book appointments for Monday, when the new testing centre opens.
Walk-ins are accepted until 4:30 p.m. on days of operation.
The St. Catharines assessment centre, located behind the Walker Family Cancer Centre at the rear of the St. Catharines hospital, 1200 Fourth Ave., also includes a drive-through testing service.
The Niagara Falls assessment centre is in the Allied Health building behind Greater Niagara General hospital, at 5673 North St. in Niagara Falls.