Health team members to move temporarily to former hospital

Members of the Niagara North Family Health Team now in the medical clinic in Virgil have been granted a temporary home in the former hospital building.

They will be moving out of the medical centre in January, when their lease will expire, until their new permanent home in The Village is ready for them.

Mary Keith, the director of the family health team, was at a council meeting recently to ask to rent about 1,380 square feet of space in the old hospital building on Wellington Street for a temporary home for team members. Those who will be moving from Virgil include nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, dieticians, an occupational therapist, a pharmacist, and chiropodist, she says.

The doctors now in the Niagara Stone Road clinic are expected to sign a new lease and remain there — there isn’t room in The Village building for all the health team doctors.

Simpson’s Pharmacy will stay where it is in Virgil, although one of its part-time pharmacists will work with the family health team one day a week, explains Sean Simpson.

Keith says the Virgil lease is set to expire at the end of 2021. Councillors approved a motion for a month-by-month rent agreement basis, giving the team a home until April, when construction of the Village Medical Centre is expected to be finished. It will also be home to the doctors now in the former hospital, and LifeLabs.