The Niverville Medical Clinic will be undergoing staff changes on April 1 which will enable them to accept new patients, welcome news for those who have moved to Niverville in the past year.
Dr. Kiannaz Kiani, one of the clinic's three current doctors, will be moving her practice to St.-Pierre-Jolys. Her current patients will still be able to access her care there if they so choose. Kiani arrived in the spring of 2014 and resides in Winnipeg.
Dr. Mina Antonious will replace her, beginning his four-year contract with Southern Health-Santé Sud by moving to Niverville and establishing his own practice as a family physician. As part of his family medicine residency, Antonious served this past year on rotation at the Health Sciences Centre, Grace Hospital, and St Boniface Hospital. He looks forward to looking after patients of all ages and doing his part to help the clinic meet its aim of offering timely access to appropriate and effective medical care.
Antonious’s special interest is emergency medicine in its two forms, medical emergencies such as strokes or heart attacks, and surgical emergencies such as fractures.
“The primary purpose of rural physicians,” Antonious says, “is to stabilize patients in crisis to the point where they can be transported to large medical centres. The difference between urban and rural settings is that in large centres, entire teams of doctors and nurses diagnose and treat a patient in emergency care; in rural settings, the physician is making decisions alone with the possible support of a nurse or two.”
Antonious began his medical training in Egypt, where he was born. After serving the mandatory two years’ return of service in Egypt as a general practitioner, he moved to British Columbia and worked for the B.C. College of Physicians until 2015, when he qualified as an international medical graduate (someone who has completed postgraduate residency training outside Canada or the United States).
From that pool of medical graduates, Southern Health selected him to sponsor his professional development. He is enthusiastic to be a part of the multidisciplinary team at the Niverville Medical Clinic.
In the near future, a new nurse practitioner will be joining the team as well. Laura Hill has been the sole NP with the clinic since 2013. Like Hill, the new NP will have her own patient list with duties similar to that of a family physician. Nurse practitioners can prescribe medications and order tests for their patients.
Doctors Mairi and Chris Burnett established Niverville Medical Clinic in 2005, pioneering the concept of a multidisciplinary primary care team that incorporates both regional health and private venture partnership.
