Walk-in clinic to broaden Woolwich healthcare options
Preparations now underway at Waterloo St. Jacobs Urgent Care, which is set to open on Apr. 3
ST. JACOBS RESIDENTS WILL soon have their first ever walk-in clinic, set to open the first week of April.
Waterloo St. Jacobs Urgent Care will be a walk-in clinic and a family practice, so you can walk in without an appointment or make an appointment with the doctor ahead of time.
The clinic and family practice is being set up by Anjou Mehta Medical Consultancy (AMMC), which operates numerous clinics across Ontario.
Rakesh Mistry, general manager for AMMC, was on site this week working to get the clinic set up.
He says AMMC decided there was a need for this type of service in St. Jacobs and opening the clinic has been in the works for the past six months.
“What they found was that this location specifically was lacking urgent care and a walk-in facility. So obviously the plaza right beside us there’s the family practice, but they’re no longer accepting new patients,” Mistry said.
The St. Jacobs Pharmasave is also in the adjacent plaza for patients needing prescriptions filled.
The plan is for the clinic to offer more services for a broad range of people under one roof, making it a one-stop shop where everyone is welcome.
For example, they will have a physiotherapist on site. Down the line they’d like to add a registered massage therapist and an orthotics specialist.
They will have both male and female physicians, with the female physician starting right away. He says they are both local to the area.
“What we like to do is when we go to all these clinics I would say the first year you get going, the second, third and fourth year we start introducing a lot of specialists. So for example, one of the clinics that we have in Mississauga we started off as a walk-in urgent care facility. After two, three years we have pediatrics, cardiologists, gastroenterologists, we have an orthotic specialist. So we like to bring a broad range of services to people, so that way it’s easy for them, instead of travelling everywhere to find a specialist.”
It appears the need is real here, as they’ve only been advertising the clinic through the newspaper and flyers sent to local postal codes for two weeks, and they’ve already had 200 people call them, interested in having a new family doctor.
They want to have it set up as a lab as well, so they expect all the receptionists will be phlebotomy trained and able to take blood. They may even hire more if it gets too busy.
“We’re very strict with who we hire. I’ve had doctors come up to me asking me to help them because they can’t understand why people are having issues with their clinic, but you find that their staff are just being really rude to patients and it’s a reflection
being binary, being ‘either or’, but that’s not always the case,” says King, who at Guelph holds the Canada Research Chair in Animal Reproductive Biotechnology. “Gender covers a spectrum, a whole range from male to female, and these horses fall somewhere in the middle.”
A detailed look reveals that at the start of the reproductive tract, the horses have what you might expect to find in a mare, such as a vulva, clitoris and vagina.
But then things start to change. The deeper you go anatomically, the more the mystery grows: these animals have the internal reproductive organs of a stallion.
Now, these internal organs are not functional. For example, the vagina leads to what’s called a blind-ending uterus. Past that, the reproductive organs are also underdeveloped and non-functional … but rather than being female parts, they’re male.
King and his group are the first ever to discover the reasons behind it in horses. They say it’s caused by a mutated gene called the androgen receptor (AR) gene that influences normal sexual development.
The AR gene makes a protein that attaches to testosterone. It acts like a lock, into which the testosterone key fits or binds. And it influences other genes that regulate normal sexual development before birth and during puberty.
Both males and females have the AR gene. But during embryonic development in a male with a mutated gene, the embryo reverts to producing female reproductive organs. Internally, though, it still has remnants of male testes. Through the horse’s lifetime, these remnants will produce some measure of testosterone.
In the equine sector, these mutations create major issues for horse breeders trying to breed what they think is a mare. In reality, but unbeknownst to the breeders, such horses are sterile. And if they’re paired for breeding, as you can imagine, they don’t like it. Their elevated testosterone levels make them behave like stallions, acting aggressively towards each other.
Such failed breeding sends breeders and their veterinarians on a diagnostic search for the cause of the problem, such as fertility testing. But that kind of testing does not reveal mutated AR genes.
Such problems prompted studies of this behaviour by King’s team dating back to 2011, and have involved three separate horses or horse families in Canada, South Africa and Denmark.
The research team is now examining genetic samples of other animals, including livestock, to determine if similar mutations exist.
Funding for this research has been provided by the Canada Research Chairs program and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.