Woolwich Community Health Centre (WCHC), in St. Jacobs, serves a geographical catchment area (click here to see a map) that includes Woolwich Township. All residents of this catchment area are eligible to access programs and services at WCHC. However, people MUST be registered for primary health care at WCHC in St. Jacobs, in order to access primary health care appointments, lab services, and on-call. The health centre is NOT a walk-in clinic. Same-day, urgent appointments are available to registered patients, but you must call first to make an appointment.
As of April 2012, WCHC has stopped accepting applications to register for primary health care. WCHC is committed to maintaining high quality of service delivery and reasonable access for all clients that we accept into our provider caseloads. Our provider caseloads are almost full, and we are now only bringing in new clients who are already on our waiting list. Once we fill our caseloads, there will still be several hundred applicants on our waiting list – if we had funding to hire more providers, we could accept more primary health care clients.
We are asking our funders for more resources to hire more providers, in order to be able to accept more patients. Until that happens, we will not be able to accept new applications. We continue to monitor this situation and we will re-assess whether circumstances have changed such that we might change this decision.
Access to group programs, such as fitness and health education sessions, are not affected by the closure of primary health care intake. Most of the programs and services at WCHC in St. Jacobs focus on these 'priority populations', based on the extent of and unique nature of their health needs, and the availability of other services for these populations.
