BridgeCare Official Ribbon Cutting Event
On Thursday August 15, CKOHT and its partners held a BridgeCare Clinic Ribbon Cutting Event at its location of 20 Emma St., Chatham. BridgeCare is a new weekend primary care clinic that is walk-in style for patients without a family doctor or nurse practitioner. BridgeCare has serviced 235 unique patients and over 285 visits on 6 weekends from July 6 to August 11. The event commemorated the clinic’s early success with an official ceremony with special guests in attendance such as MPP Trevor Jones, Mayor Darrin Canniff and many local health care leaders.
BridgeCare is a new CKOHT initiative funded by the Ministry of Health to assist with providing primary care services to the approximately 25,000 residents in Chatham-Kent who do not have a family doctor or nurse practitioner. The goal of the funding is to increase access and attachment to primary care.
“Those 40 to 80 people a weekend that we’re seeing would otherwise not have access to care. So the options for them would have been to be seen at CKHA or another hospitalized institution,” said Jason Bartell, executive director of the CK Family Health Team. ” Chatham-Kent doesn’t really have that many walk-in clinics, so it does put that pressure on the hospital. So this is now an opportunity to have care that’s outside of the hospital.” “We really tried to focus on what the need of Chatham-Kent was,” said Bartell.

Additionally as part of this initiative, the CKOHT and its partners have helped to expand service delivery for the MobileCare CK clinic on wheels – to allow more hours to be offered at additional locations across CK. As part of the Ribbon Cutting event, attendees were also able to take a tour of the MobileCare bus. CKOHT continues to work collaboratively with its partners on unique and innovative models of health care to service the CK community.
