The entire PrimeCure Clinic staff, including Drs. Gert Grobler and Andre Claassen, pose in a photo in their new Maple Avenue space on Thursday.--News Photo Anna Smith
asmith@medicinehatnews.com
A new medical clinic celebrated its grand opening Thursday afternoon, and staff look forward to helping the city’s ongoing capacity issues in regards to available health care.
Drs. Gert Grobler and Andre Claassen have come together to open their space at 402 Maple Avenue, and were touched by the warm reception and interest since they first started taking patients at the clinic on Monday. The pair have a long professional history, and a strong bond which they say makes the practice possible.
“Dr. Claassen and myself go back 30 years,” said Grobler. “I was working at the HealthWorx Clinic for walk-ins. And yeah, Dr. Claassen, he told me that he’s going to open a new clinic and asked if I will join him as a partner. And I said, ‘What I can do there, I can do here.”
Both doctors worked at the HealthWorx clinic previously, and while they are grateful for the opportunities they had there, said Claassen, he felt a smaller practice would be beneficial to his work, and pursued opening the space.
Claassen will be continuing his family practice at the PrimeCure clinic, bringing with him many of his patients as well as many of his staff, while Grobler will be holding walk-in hours.
“I think I can help more people with a walk-in clinic in my own family practice, because there’s a lot of patients that don’t have family doctors,” said Grobler. “I think in the last three years, probably 10 family doctors have left Medicine Hat. There’s a few newer young doctors coming in, but they close their panels very quickly, and there’s still people without family doctors who need help.”
The place has come together in a relatively short period of time, said Grobler, with him and Claassen doing much of the painting and installing the flooring themselves alongside their families, who have been of great help.
“My wife is the practice manager. She runs the place and she has been instrumental in getting this all together in such a short period of time. We are very proud of what we’ve done here,” said Claassen.
Currently, the clinic will be open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m, though both Grobler and Claassen said they expect to be expanding those hours in the near future, depending on demand, as keeping the wait times lower for the patients of both doctors is a priority.
