New health care center in former Costco in St. John’s opens Tuesday

A new health care facility is opening this week in a former Costco building in St. John’s, providing many of the outpatient services that were transferred from city hospitals.

“It’s been a number of years, but it’s exciting to see that now, on Tuesday, we have patients coming in the door,” said Kim Pike, clinical planner for Capital Planning and Engineering.

“We have a beautiful space here that patients can easily visit.”

The two-story Unity Health Center at 28 Stavanger Drive opened for public tours on Sunday, with dozens of people arriving to see it for the first time. Patients will start coming on Tuesday.

Seats are filled in the spacious waiting area on both floors, with brightly colored signage for the various clinics. The center has free parking, large murals on the walls and will eventually have a coffee shop and drugstore.

Pike says patients will be able to move easily to the new space, and “we won’t have the maze of our large and intimidating acute care hospital.”

She thinks “it will be a much more calming and pleasant experience” for people accessing health care. Patients will have shorter distances to walk, he said, as well as a central waiting area and better signage.

Many outpatient services from the Health Sciences Centre, Janeway and St. Clair Hospital have moved to the new centre, with more facilities to open later.

The clinics opening on Tuesday include medicine and surgery specialty clinics, eye clinic, bariatric and total combined assessment, plastic surgery outpatient, end.occrine, thrombosis, gAnal Medicine, Cardiac Diagnostics, Orthopedics, Audiology and X-ray, among others.

More services will open in December, including blood collection, physiotherapy and occupational therapy, ultrasound appointments, a pre-admission clinic and a pain clinic. Two MRI machines will be added to the building in January.

An urgent care center will also open at the site later this year.

NL Health Services is leasing the space, which was a big draw for the area when it housed Costco, before relocating in 2019.

“We’ve revitalized, revitalized an area of ​​the city that was once kind of a desert town,” Pike said.

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