First medical clinic opening in West St. Paul

West St. Paul's first medical clinic is slated to open on March 10, 2025. (Dan Timmerman/CTV News)

A new clinic just outside the Perimeter Highway is ready to accept patients.

The West St. Paul Medical Clinic held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Saturday ahead of its official opening on Monday.

The clinic is the brainchild of Dr. Temitope Ayaji, a Nigerian-born family doctor who came to Manitoba three years ago.

The facility will be the first medical clinic to open in West St. Paul, a community of about 7,000 people just northeast of Winnipeg.

“We aim to provide comprehensive, personalized and individualized healthcare for people living in West St. Paul and the adjoining areas,” Ayaji told CTV News Saturday.

“We’re going to do a lot of chronic disease management and long-term care,” he explained. “There will be opportunities for walk-in patients as well.”

He said the clinic will also offer childhood immunizations and travel vaccinations, along with minor procedures like joint injections.

But most importantly, he said the clinic will help address the need for more family doctors in Manitoba.

“I never knew it was a big issue until I arrived in Canada.”

He said Canada needs to open more medical universities, as well as open more spaces for aspiring doctors in existing ones.

“I think Canada as a whole has about 13 universities for medicine, which I think is inadequate to meet the demands,” Ayaji said.

Ayajialso thinks more should be done to make family medicine an attractive career path for doctors. He said the government should provide more help to family doctors interested in opening and expanding clinics.

“To be able to have more doctors and reduce the patient-doctor ratio in Canada.”

According to a Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) report released in October 2023, Manitoba had the second-lowest number of doctors per capita in the country. It found the province had 215 physicians per 100,000 residents, which is below the national average of 247.

“We hope we can improve that over the next few years, but a lot still needs to go into that.”

Ayaji grew up in Nigeria and started practicing medicine in 2008 after graduating from the University of Ibadan. Seven years later, he moved to Wales and was awarded the Academic Clinical Fellowship in General Practice by the National Institute of Health and Care Research.

He completed his residency and specialist training in Leicester, and in 2021, the fellowship culminated in a Master of Research degree in clinical sciences from the University of Leicester.

He moved to Manitoba in 2022 and started working at Selkirk’s Easton Place Clinic as an academic family physician until earlier this year.

Ayaji said he chose Manitoba following his academic career because the job in Selkirk was focused on caring for elderly people. And while he was warned about the province’s brutally cold winters, Ayaji said he simply looks on the bright side.

“The radiant sunshine,” Ayaji said. “Even if it’s cold, I still get some sunshine.”