No appointment? No problem!

Open-door policy
Herzl CRIU Walk-in Centre welcomes patients
who lack a family doctor but want to avoid the ER
Sunday morning, and the whole family is together. Eddie Shahini and his wife, Franca,
are reading. Nearby, 7-year-old Vanessa and 5-year-old Andrew are playing quietly with
hand-held video games. A picture of domestic tranquility? It would be if this were an
average Sunday. But it’s not.
It’s early January and winter has landed with full force. Vanessa
has come down with a fever and Andrew’s cough won’t go away.
They need help—now. Which is why they and their parents are
waiting patiently in the bright, airy lounge of the Herzl CRIU Walkin
Centre, an innovative, community-based satellite of the Jewish
General Hospital, just up the block from the main hospital building.
Normally, Eddie and Franca would have two options. They could
keep the kids at home and hope for an appointment with their doctor
later in the week. (The risky down-side: a bad medical situation
might get much worse.) Or they could seek immediate help in
a hospital Emergency room. (The extremely fatiguing down-side:
they’d probably face a marathon wait at the height of flu season.)
Luckily, they have a third choice: the Herzl CRIU Walk-in Centre,
available 365 days a year to anyone without an appointment or a
prior phone call. Just drop in—which is what the Shahinis did.
Today, as on most days on the fifth floor at 5858 Côte-des-
Neiges, a line-up forms early, snaking around the corner and down
the hall by the time the Centre’s doors are opened. Scarves are unwound
and salty slush scraped off boots, amid hushed conversations
in French and English, as well as cell phone conversations in
Spanish, Polish and Chinese.
After registering and settling into their seats in the lounge, the
patients-to-be find what diversion they can. This being a Sunday,
some watch a gospel music show on the Walk-in Centre’s large flatscreen
television (kid-friendly DVD movies will be shown later.)
A couple of children are fascinated by the bubbles rising in the
water cooler as they fill their paper cones. Older fingers flip through
paperbacks and magazines, while younger ones tap on tiny screens.
Many people, many colours, many ages, all seeking the same thing:
relief—some from eye infections, others from back sprains, this
one from a bout of unexplained dizziness, that one from the sharp
twinges of pregnancy.
Mr. Shahini knows the routine because he brought his kids to the
Centre a week earlier. Vanessa was given antibiotics for a sore throat,
but now she’s running a fever. The ear infection that had been bothering
Andrew is gone, but his week-old cough hasn’t cleared up.
“We’re one sick family,” says Mr. Shahini. “I’m on antibiotics, too,
for strep throat. But it’s winter. What can you do?”
What you can’t do, he says, is run the ER gauntlet. “Even a couple
of hours here is better than who-knows-how-long in an ER. We’re
very happy with the way the kids were treated the last time they
were here. And it’s not like they were rushed in and out in two minutes.
There’s a real human connection. If the staff need to take their
time with you, that’s what they do.”
Even though waiting times in the Walk-in Centre are generally
10 spriNG 2011
Care for all.
Nurse Rosette Castor performs a preliminary assessment of Rolando
Rimando’s stomach discomfort.
shorter—sometimes much shorter—than in the ER, waits of three
hours or more are not unheard of during busy periods, such as cold
and flu season. But when waiting times are lengthy, patients are given
beepers so they can shop or run errands in the neighbourhood,
and be notified when their turn is coming up.
Though today’s visit means a great deal to the Shahinis, it does
raise a key question: Is such an ambitious project really worth
launching just to relieve some relatively simple aches and pains?
The answer is “Yes”, because there are far-reaching consequences
to the work of the Herzl CRIU Walk-in Centre. Perhaps most significantly,
it creates a highly desirable ripple effect in the healthcare
system by being the first to pick up on potentially serious medical
conditions in patients who can’t contact their regular doctor or have
no family doctor at all.