The last two years have flown by, marked this week by the second birthday of the opening of the Mirboo North Medical Centre building on Ridgway.
It was December 11th 2021 when the community came together for the official opening of the building and then the following Monday the Mirboo North Medical Centre practice opened the doors of their new home to their patients.
A Vision Realised: Celebrating Two Years
“The Community Foundation invested $1.85 million in this state of the art facility during 2020 and 2021 as an impact investment. This means the return was part financial and part social, in the form of improved health outcomes for the community,” explains Rob Kiddell, Chair of the Community Foundation.
The building brings health outcomes through securing an accessible and affordable health service for our district: accessible in terms of its central location and providing twice as much space for the practice to expand into; and affordable in the sense that all of its patients are bulk billed.
In this day and age it is a rarity not to be charged a gap fee for medical services.
“According to some statistics from the Gippsland Primary Health Network, there are 27 medical clinics within an hour’s drive of Mirboo North,” says Dr. Sonya Moncrieff, “but only four of those clinics universally bulk bill their patients. Mirboo North Medical Centre is one of those four.”
The Community Foundation’s $1.85 Million Commitment
In addition to the three bulk billing GPs who have seen between 60-90 patients per day over the last year, the centre has also had two psychologists, a physiotherapist, a mental health nurse and two chronic disease management nurses working from the centre.
Since it opened the Mirboo North Medical Centre has also had a pathology service in operation two days a week. This service runs in the Zadnik Pathology Room, which was added to the original medical centre building proposal with funding from a bequest by Allambee resident, Joe Zadnik, to the Community Foundation in 2016.
To learn more about leaving a Bequest with the Community Foundation, click here.
To learn more about the Medical Centre, click here.