Dr. James French · September 14, 2026

From Monday, September 14, 2026, White Pine Medical can no longer book new urgent care appointments.

Since March, our urgent care service at 2 Hampton Road, Rothesay, inside ForFitness and Athletics, has offered same-day and next-day appointments to people who don't have a family doctor, or who develop a problem that can't wait for their own. The aim was to take pressure off our local emergency departments, and it worked. I want to explain what the service achieved, why it has to change, and what it means for you.

• If you already have an appointment booked with me, it will go ahead as planned.
• If you see me for longevity medicine, complex case management or a deep-dive assessment, your care continues as normal. These services are not affected by this change.
• If I wrote you a prescription or ordered tests for you at an urgent care visit, we will offer you one follow-up appointment. After that, your ongoing care will need to continue with your family doctor or nurse practitioner, or through the options below.
• We cannot book new urgent care appointments, including for a new problem if we have seen you before.

• No family doctor or nurse practitioner? NB Health Link is the official way to find one. Sign up at nbhealthlink.ca.
• Health advice day or night, or questions about Patient Connect NB: call Tele-Care 811.
• Minor ailments: your community pharmacist can assess and treat many common conditions.
• Emergencies: call 911 or go to your nearest emergency department.
• Questions for us: call the clinic at (506) 847-7263.

We have provided 393 urgent care episodes since March. Having spent most of my career in emergency medicine, I am proud of what they achieved. Our clinical activity report, updated on September 8, found:

• About half of our patients would otherwise have gone to an emergency department, by their own account. That is on the order of 170 emergency visits in six months.
• Most had nowhere else to go in time. 46% of our walk-in patients had no family doctor, 1.7 times the provincial rate. Of those who did, about 30% found their doctor on leave and about 60% faced a wait of more than three weeks.
• Care was fast and followed through. 82% of patients were seen the same or next day, every patient was contacted after their visit, and 65% returned for follow-up.
• These were complete episodes of care. Tests and referrals were followed through, minor procedures were done on site, and three patients with neurological emergencies were identified and sent straight to the Saint John Regional Hospital emergency department.
• It cost the system less. An office visit is $61.79 under the New Brunswick Physicians' Manual. The Canadian Institute for Health Information puts an emergency department visit at $304.

Demand was far beyond what we could meet. We were receiving 40 to 70 calls a day that we could not answer, in an area with very little walk-in or next-day capacity: the New Brunswick Medical Society lists just one after-hours clinic for Rothesay and Quispamsis.

Our patients came from across greater Saint John. 41% came from Saint John itself and a further 32% from Rothesay and Quispamsis, essentially the same catchment as the Saint John Regional Hospital emergency department and the St. Joseph's Hospital urgent care centre. Others travelled from as far as Charlotte County.

I have invested significant time and funds in building an electronic health record system that reduces the paperwork that takes clinicians away from patients. It uses intelligent process automation to draft much of what family physicians would otherwise complete by hand, including test requisitions, referrals to other services, and WorkSafeNB, insurance and special authorization forms. It also follows up with every patient automatically after their visit.

The system applies best-practice principles from project management, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management platforms, and we have begun bringing technology used in the private sector into public care. For example, we were about to launch body composition testing for every patient started on a GLP-1 medication, to make sure they lose fat, including visceral fat, rather than muscle.

Our initial health assessment adapts to each person: answers to screening questions trigger further questions, so that every aspect of someone's life is captured. We also ask every patient about the social determinants of health, such as housing, food, income and transport, because they shape how we care for people.

I have not been paid for any of this work. Without a Medicare site billing number there is no way to bill for it, and I have been funding the disposables, the supplies, the electronic health record systems and the clinical risk myself. I love community medicine, but I cannot provide it for free. That is fair neither to me nor to the system.

This came as a surprise. Clinicians have established many clinics across southern New Brunswick that offer ad hoc primary care to supplement the existing system. The New Brunswick Medical Society lists 11 walk-in and after-hours clinics in the Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton areas, and 27 across the province, and these clinics have a long track record of operating and being supported. As far as I know, leaving clinical work of this kind unfunded is an unprecedented step.

Horizon Health Network has explained that its priority is to develop collaborative care clinics, where doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses and other health professionals work together as a team, along with the access clinics that feed into them. I very much support that. Team-based care achieves better outcomes, and it is where primary care should be going.

But these clinics take time to build, there is not yet one in our area, and we are still a very long way from having enough coverage for all of New Brunswick's unattached patients. In the interim, people need somewhere to go, and that is what we were providing. Part of innovation is giving entrepreneurs the support and space to develop new and better ways of working.

There is a chance White Pine Medical could become an access clinic for the collaborative care clinic being developed in Saint John's North End, and I am working as closely as I can with Horizon on an arrangement that works for everyone. I will keep you updated.

I am disappointed, and sad to be making this change. We have met many people who had not seen a family doctor in decades. With physiotherapy, chiropractic, strength and conditioning, a dietitian and psychotherapy all under one roof, inside a family business that has served this community for 45 years, I believe we have delivered a very good service.

Thank you to every patient who trusted us with their care, and to the family physicians, nurse practitioners and pharmacists who worked alongside us. I hope this changes.

Dr. James French, BSc, BM, Dip IMC RCS (Ed), FRCEM

Emergency Physician, Saint John Regional Hospital

CEO and Founder, White Pine Medical