The staff at the Prince Rupert maternity clinic has decided to push back a review of the new clinic from six months to a year because it is moving to a new location.
The maternity clinic came into effect back in October and changed how prenatal and obstetrics care is accessed in Prince Rupert. Before the clinic, women received pregnancy care from their family physician or by referral to another doctor trained in obstetrics.
When the maternity clinic was introduced, all prenatal care would be done through the clinic and not through family doctors. The clinic system eases the workload on physicians, but requires pregnant women to see multiple doctors throughout the course of their pregnancy, and they don’t know which one will be on call when they go into labour.
Some women balked at the fact that the changes had been made without any input from them or the public. Dr. Marius Pienaar, who came up with the clinic system, said that the changes were necessary in order to recruit new doctors and retain current ones, but also said there would be a review of the program with possible public input after six months. Six months later, that review is being pushed back to a year.
The reason for the delay is because the clinic is being moved from the hospital to the primary healthcare centre on McBride Street.
“We were going to do a formal survey, but the we thought ‘well, that would be a little bit useless.’ We’ll be able to say this is how the hospital clinic did but it won’t tell us how the new clinic is going to do, we’d have to do it all over again,” says Pienaar.
Pienaar says that there are pros and cons to moving to the new location. The upside to the new location, according to Pienaar, is the there will be more room for the clinic. At the hospital the clinic has to operate out of limited space and patients often have to wait in the hall for their appointments; the new location will have a real waiting room.
The downside is that it goes against the clinic’s original goal of having all the different services for pregnant women in one place.
“[Pregnant women] come to the hospital and get their blood work, ultrasound and doctor’s visit all in the same spot. And now they have to go to two spots, like back when they went to the doctors office, to see the doctor at the clinic and get an ultrasound at the hospital,” says Pienaar.