Cold Lake – CL Medical Clinic will begin to open its doors on Saturdays to test the demand and capacity for additional clinic hours in the community.

“We will be staffing the clinic for certain hours on Saturdays to allow our doctors to begin to schedule appointments with their patients,” Chair of the CL Medical Clinic Board and City Councillor Chris Vining said. “This will give doctors a chance to strengthen their practice through additional billable hours while also measuring the demand for clinic hours outside of the regular work week.”

At the outset, there will be no set time for the Saturday clinic hours. Rather, certain Saturday times will be made available to the clinic’s patients depending on their doctors’ availability. The clinic will ultimately set its Saturday hours pending the demand it sees. Once the demand is known, regular hours for Saturday could be scheduled and advertised, and could reach the point where full days are scheduled.

The intention would be to keep the Saturday bookings for simple, straight forward appointments, such as prescription refills. It is hoped that this pilot project also opens up the potential opportunity for CL Medical Clinic and its physicians to explore weekend walk-in clinics.

“At this point we do not know if the doctors will have the availability to hold enough Saturday hours to warrant us staying open, or how patients will respond to the increase in availability,” Vining said. “There are a lot of variables at play, and so a pilot project is the best means of testing the waters and seeing what the public wants, and how we can best respond with the staff and doctors we currently have.”

CL Medical Clinic is a municipally controlled corporation that owns and operates a medical clinic located at 2504 Glacier Gate in Cold Lake North. The corporation is run by a board consisting of City Councillors and members at large appointed by Cold Lake City Council.