Dear Community,
The Golden Medical Clinic is currently struggling with regular physician staffing and this is resulting in very long waits for appointments.
The situation is due to a number of factors, including the departure of one of our regular physicians, physician retirements, and the increasing demands of our surgical program and the emergency department.
All of our doctors work at both the clinic and hospital, and this can make scheduling time in the clinic very challenging. We are actively recruiting and hope to have more medical staff in place sometime in 2025. In the meantime, we request your patience, especially with our front desk staff. They will do their best to get you in when you need to be seen, but they can only work with the physician availability that they are given.
We still endeavour to fit in urgent visits quickly. For predictable appointments like prescription renewals, please book well ahead of when you will run out of medication. Right now, getting people in for non-emergency visits is averaging 3 weeks.
We are one of few family medicine clinics in the province to still see all people in the community regardless of whether they have a regular family physician or not. We believe it is important to the community to keep access to primary care open to all who need it. This means a longer wait when we are short-staffed, but denying access to any of the people of Golden is not the clinic we want to be. We are working hard to increase our staff and offer you all quicker appointments when needed. We appreciate your understanding as we continue to address the situation.
