Patient-Driven Healthcare Based on Caring, Safety and Respect
Clinic 554 (http://clinic554.ca/) is a family practice devoted to patient-driven healthcare. Our team aims to further the experiences of health and wellbeing of patients through principles of respect, inclusiveness, and evidence-based practices. We strive to include the voices of community groups to promote equity and advocacy, and to create a space that contributes to patient empowerment.
At Clinic 554, we believe patient-driven healthcare is centred upon caring, safety, and respect. We believe harm-reduction is an essential approach to healthcare, and that patients have a right to self-affirming services. We are committed to sex-positive, gender-celebratory care, anti-racist and feminist practices, and full-scope reproductive care, including abortions.
What Makes Clinic 554 So Special to New Brunswick
Clinic 554 was created by community effort (https://fundrazr.com/aoCmf?ref=ab_00NPmCqyTbl00NPmCqyTbl) to save the only community-based abortion clinic between Montreal and St. John's in 2014. Clinic 554 opened as a general primary care clinic that continued to offer abortions, but expanded its services to include emergency IUDs, gender care, queer-positive care, HIV and hepatitis care, and addiction care. We are the only site in the Province that accepts self-referrals for hormone assessments for transgender patients, and we see folks from across the Maritimes for this. The clinic has become a beacon of hope for marginalized people from all walks of life, from our 30' rainbow wall to our partnerships with youth and local human rights advocates and activists.
Yet, despite our best efforts to de-stigmatize gender and reproductive healthcare, our government has persistently refused to fund abortions outside of a hospital setting. As such, women in New Brunswick have never known what it's like to have the same access to reproductive care available in every other Province in Canada with a community-based clinic. Not only is this in contravention of the Canada Health Act but it violates the basic healthcare rights of every woman in New Brunswick, offloading government responsibility to our communities and the team at Clinic 554. As a model, this has never been sustainable and despite repeated meetings and appeals to the powers that be, medicare funding for abortions continues to be restricted to hospitals - even for medical abortions! Unfortunately, no team can provide healthcare indefinitely when its government refuses lawful funding to do so, let alone survive a catastrophic natural disaster...
Fredericton Flood of 2018
At the end of April 2018, Fredericton - New Brunswick's capital city - began to fall under the flood tides of the Sant John (Wolastoq) River, shutting down more than 40 streets and causing government buildings and schools to close. On May 1st, 2018, despite the heroic efforts of a bucket brigade of volunteers working tirelessly, for countless hours, to try to save the clinic, Clinic 554 was forced to close our doors. The entrances submerged and the power cut off, as we watched our beloved clinic fill with water. If the clinic is to re-open, we will need to raise enough to pay the insurance deductible AND stay afloat during this time of repairs, replacement equipment purchases, and lost income. Any extra money would be put towards improving our reproductive health services and possibly adding a birthing centre to assist families hoping to birth in the community but who live too far from hospital to do so!
Check out the following video: https://youtu.be/vk8OB1s5rek. it was taken three days before the clinic flooded. Clinic 554 is just beyond the excavator seen at the 2min42sec mark. Our road entrance has been blocked since then but on May 1st, the groundwater system gave out and with only two of the clinic's walls submerged by the river, the water started flowing in from all four sides.
