Hospital staffing shortages are forcing some major changes at the Port Colborne and Fort Erie Urgent Care Centres.
Niagara Health announcing that they will be closing the Fort Erie and Port Colborne Urgent Care Centres overnight.
As of July 5 the two centres will only be open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week.
President and CEO Lynn Guerriero says it is a necessary step to maintain emergency departments in the region, "The priority for us and the commitment we are making to the community is that we will do everything we can to keep our emergency departments open so those being Welland, Niagara Falls, and St. Catharines. In order to do that we have to have the ability to redeploys some of our physicians who would normally work overnight in the urgent care centres to work in our emergency departments."
Niagara Health says that emergency departments are short 274 physician shifts scheduled between June and August alone.
Guerriero adds that even with these changes they are going to be short staff this summer, "We will still be trying to incentivize our physicians to take on additional shifts, we will still be looking at adding other types of staff to the ED's, we will probably still be working short over the summer from time to time but it will give us at least enough critical mass, we are hoping, to avoid any type of rotating closures."
The urgent care centres in Port Colborne and Fort Erie have been averaging roughly one patient every three hours between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m with 75% of visits happening between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.
Niagara Health say the top two reasons people visit the urgent care centre is for upper respiratory infection and urinary tract infections.
Click HERE to listen to Lynn Guerriero discuss the changes.