West St. Paul welcomes first medical clinic

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This article was published 07/03/2025 (213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

West St. Paul has been growing by leaps and bounds, but its 7,000 residents have had to leave the bedroom community for medical care — until now.

Dr. Temitope Ajayi, a Nigerian-born, U.K.-educated family physician is opening a medical clinic on Monday.

“You shouldn’t see your patient as a number. You should see your patient as an individual,” Ajayi said Friday as the clinic, at 1051 Kapelus Dr., was being spiffied up to prepare for Saturday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“This is going to be a very good opportunity to give back to the community,” he said. “Also help to improve health access to patients and help to kind of reduce that patient-doctoral ratio that we have as a problem in Manitoba right now.”

Ajayi moved to Manitoba in 2022 and began working as an academic family physician at Easton Place Clinic in Selkirk, where he treated patients and taught medical students and resident doctors.

West St. Paul mayor Peter Truijen called the clinic a “wonderful addition” and said it will have a positive impact in the area and surrounding communities.

“This is something the residents of West St Paul have been looking forward to and (I’m) extremely glad Dr. Ajayi has chosen West St Paul to setup a medical clinic here,” he said.

After completing his studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, Ajayi relocated to the United Kingdom in 2015 and practised in Wales.

The National Institute of Health and Care Research awarded Ajayi the Academic Clinical Fellowship in General Practice, through which he completed his residency and specialist training in academic general practice in Leicester in 2020.

The fellowship culminated in a master of research degree in clinical sciences from the University of Leicester in 2021.

After his international career, he finds himself at home in West St. Paul, where he is putting down roots.

Ajayi and two other doctors will practise at the clinic. Medical students and residents will be given the opportunity to complete their studies and training.

The clinic will offer primary and long-term care for certain conditions, provide immunizations and perform minor procedures; walk-ins will be welcomed.

Ajayi chose family medicine so he could have a long-standing relationship with his patients, which he says leads to healthier outcomes.

“It goes beyond just treating their symptoms or getting them a diagnosis or breaking the bad news or comforting them all through their stages of life,” he said.

“That’s the beauty of family medicine — being able to look at people at different phases of life: when they’re pregnant, when they have a child, when the child begins to grow up, and it’s just a very suiting and very stimulating feeling.”

Ajayi pointed to gaps in the health-care system that he hopes to address.

“There is the capacity of clinics, and there is also the capacity of doctors coming in into the province,” he said. “They need to improve the criteria for foreign-trained doctors to be able to come into Canada to practise.”

Ajayi said doctors who’ve been accredited in the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia, and Ireland have an easier time receiving Canadian accreditation than physicians from other countries.

The College of Family Physicians of Canada said those countries are among the “approved jurisdictions” that meet requirements for accreditation in Canada.

Ajayi says the process must be made easier for physicians from other countries.

“The more doctors, the better it can only be,” he said.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca