Misericordia’s urgent care centre tells its final tale

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This article was published 02/10/2017 (2979 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The countdown grew short, as Monday grew long: seven hours, six hours, three hours, one. The red-and-white sign that once gazed towards the Assiniboine River was already gone, along with its titular promise: “URGENT CARE.”

Now, the sign above the Misericordia Health Centre’s south entrance offers only its address, 99 Cornish Ave.

Medicine will still happen here. The Winnipeg hospital’s Eye Care Centre of Excellence will continue, as will its other health services and functions. But the chance to see a doctor for a cut, a sudden sickness, an infection: that’s over now.

On Monday, it didn’t stop people from coming. They trickled in all morning and into the afternoon, some of them not knowing the urgent care centre was set to close so soon. Some were surprised when they heard the news.

“No wonder everyone’s here,” said one woman wearing a hospital bracelet, as she stepped out for a smoke.

Whether for flu season or some other reason, it was reportedly a busy day at the urgent care centre. One doctor told a patient, half-jokingly, he didn’t know why so many people had come: “Don’t they know it’s the last day?”

The fact is, for some patients, it’s the place they know most to go: because it’s familiar, or just close to home.

“You come here, you get the service you need, they look after you,” said one man. Kidney stones drive the 70-year-old to seek urgent care regularly; he prefers Misericordia over the busy St. Boniface Hospital emergency ward near his home.

“I don’t see why (Manitoba Premier Brian) Pallister is doing this,” the man added, as he waited for his diagnostic test results. “It’s crazy.”

The hours crept onwards, and the patients kept coming: a silver-haired couple holding hands, a mother gently guiding a child with flushed cheeks. Then the clock struck 8:00 p.m. and the doors to the centre closed; they will not reopen.

With that, a story of urgent health care in the West Broadway neighbourhood came to an end, after 46 years of telling.

Some form of it has existed in the neighbourhood since 1971, when the longstanding Misericordia was fixed up with a new emergency room. (That ER was downgraded to an urgent care centre in 1998, during another service shuffle.)

By then, the hospital was already a visual and social fixture of the region. It predates almost everything around it, having been built as a maternity hospital in 1899-1900 by the Misericordia Sisters, near their mission.

As the area grew the hospital did, too, adding new wings and treatment rooms. Its additions piled up in neat archeological layers; structures from more recent eras folded around the old brick, an architectural chimera.

Even as West Broadway changed, the hospital remained the neighbourhood’s stoic southern anchor: awkwardly squeezed between the knees of two one-way streets, its cross a neon beacon on the north bank of the river.

For decades, the beacon meant the hope of nearby 24-hour care for thousands of locals, many of them low-income and vulnerable. Of the urgent care centre’s 39,000 annual visits, nearly one-third were from the surrounding region.

It’s not a wealthy area. The vast majority of West Broadway residents are renters; about 65 per cent don’t own a vehicle. Without one, getting around Winnipeg is a challenge: buses don’t run 24 hours, taxis can be expensive.

At the West Broadway Community Organization, director Greg MacPherson has heard residents fret about the closure. He hopes the changes succeed at improving health-care delivery; but he hears their fears, and listens.

“When it comes to a political entity making large-scale changes, they do have an impact that starts with the most vulnerable people,” MacPherson said. “They feel it first… so I’m hopeful, but those are my concerns.”

Meanwhile, it is a time of change for West Broadway. Boosted by comparatively affordable rents and young energy, the Sherbrook Street strip is thriving. It is flush with both new watering holes and new ideas on community-building.

Above all, it’s a neighbourhood that has been exploring the meaning of connection. To many who live there, that’s what makes the area special: a social fabric stitched by the hands of people, non-profit organizations and regional business.

“That allows for a richness that’s present here,” MacPherson said. “Because so many people walk, we all interact with each other all the time. There is a sense of being together in a neighbourhood, a sense of all moving together.”

Now, for the first time in a generation, West Broadway will find out what it means to go without an urgent care option on its doorstep. Time will tell how severing that immediate local connection reshapes the neighbourhood’s life.

On Monday, just hours before the doors closed for good, some ripples were already spreading.

At the Nook diner across Sherbrook, staff know many hospital workers not only by name, but by their daily order. For weeks, they’ve watched urgent care workers come in and stare into their coffee, quietly announcing their last day.

And they think about their own urgent care centre visits, and what it meant to see those familiar faces providing care. Relationships made over short-order sandwiches and a century of local history, now scattered elsewhere.

“I just can’t understand it,” one diner worker said, shaking his head. “It’s a loss, for sure.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca