New urgent care clinic in downtown Kitchener to open in former funeral home

A group of local doctors are breathing new life into an old funeral home in downtown Kitchener by turning it into an urgent care clinic.

"We recognize there is a need for such a clinic just to take away the pressure from the waiting areas in hospitals," Falah Hafuth, an emergency room doctor and the head of the project told Craig Norris, host of the Morning Edition on CBC Radio. "It's an urgent care clinic doing some minor cases. We can leave emergency physicians to take care of major cases, which is heart attack, stroke, trauma."

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The doctors are renovating the former Schreiter-Sandrock Funeral Home on Benton Street in Kitchener and Hafuth said the location was chosen because it's near the downtown core, which is under served.

"It's estimated that it's about 14,000 in the whole of Kitchener [are] unattached patients. That means they don't have a family doctor. So those patients, most of the time, they make their way to emergency," for care like getting prescription renewals, cuts or if they're feeling sick.

He expects the clinic would serve about 50 patients a day.

$2.5 million renovations

The doctors work as emergency physicians at Grand River Hospital and St. Mary's Hospital in Kitchener and Guelph General Hospital and will split their time between the hospitals and the clinic.

The urgent care clinic is schedule to open Nov. 1 and the care is covered under OHIP. The clinic will be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

There will also be a dentist on site, who would be able to handle emergency cases, and Hafuth said they may have a family physician in the building in the near future.

"We have lots of space," he said.

Hafuth said the cost to renovate the old funeral home is about $2.5 million.

"We tried to give this building, which is a beautiful building, a different look. It's a historic building, it was built in 1890," Hafuth said of the funeral home. "It has the beautiful outside look and holding huge history, so we love to keep it and we keep it in a good way – extending life this time, not ending the chapter of it."