Proposed health campus would aim to provide more Airdrie residents with access to healthcare

A series of open houses this weekend in Airdrie focussed on health care and how best to meet the needs of the city’s more than 85,000 residents.

Airdrie doesn’t have a hospital so its residents rely on the only urgent care centre in the city.

“The question about having a hospital has been on the agenda for decades now and every time we look at it, it seems to go further and further away,” said  Dr. Julian Kyne of One Health Associated Medical.

“So what we've said is let's start making the realizable steps that we can move forward with, because every time we do this, we improve overall health care.”

It's estimated that as many as 20,000 residents do not have a family doctor and the hope is this centre could help ease backlogs at the urgent care centre.

“We've worked on this plan for several months, and now we've got something with meat on it; so now it's important to present it to the public and say, What do you think? What ideas do you have? What do you think's not going to work? And what are we doing right here potentially?” asked Kyne.

The plan is to create a one-stop shop that would include primary health care, urgent care, diagnostic imaging, medical specialists and a pharmacy.

Initially, One Health hopes to be able to create 10 primary care teams that could support up to 15,000 patients.