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Mary Obstfeld, a nurse practitioner in the Cold Lake, Alta., area since 2016, believes it’s time to open her own nurse-practitioner-led clinic close to home.
Obstfeld, who is currently helping Cold Lake First Nations transform its health centre into a primary care clinic, is working to open the Ardmore Family Primary Care Clinic in Ardmore, a hamlet about 260 kilometres northeast of Edmonton.
“People in the area have struggled with getting connected to a primary care provider and staying with that provider for some time,” she said.
Nurse practitioners provide comprehensive family medicine services including managing chronic conditions, prescribing medications, doing exams and drivers’ medicals, Obstfeld said.
“It’s not to say that we are replacing physicians,” she said.
“It’s more we are another option for care delivery and kind of doing the same thing, coming about it from a different angle.”
Nurse practitioners are increasingly stepping in to fill gaps in primary care as Albertans struggle to find family doctors.
According to Lucie Lapierre, president of the Nurse Practitioner Association of Alberta, practitioners are registered nurses who return to university after years of clinical experience to earn a master’s degree or PhD, allowing them to provide comprehensive care.
“We’re working independently and alongside our interdisciplinary teams, but we do not need to be overseen or do not need to have supervision from other professionals or physicians, which is a common misunderstanding,” Lapierre said.
Alberta’s Nurse Practitioner Primary Care Program (NPPCP), introduced in 2024, has allowed more nurse practitioners to open independent practices or join existing clinics. The program pays them to practise comprehensive primary care to patients of all ages, have a roster of at least 900 patients and provide after-hours care.
About 100 nurse practitioners provincewide are working through this program, Lapierre said.
Addressing rural health-care challenges requires a team approach, and nurse practitioners are playing a key role, said Tracy Sopkow, CEO of the Rural Health Professions Action Plan, an organization dedicated to increasing rural Alberta’s health-care workforce.
“When [nurse practitioners] work alongside physicians and other health-care professionals as part of an integrated team, they certainly strengthen and raise the level of care in rural communities,” she said.
Without accessible primary care, Spokow said, people have to seek care elsewhere, and there is a risk some won’t seek the help they need as a result.
Additionally, nurse practitioners can relieve pressure from some existing health services and improve access to specialized health care, said Colleen Norris, a professor and associate dean of research at the University of Alberta’s faculty of nursing.
“We really can make it a better health-care system if we start using [nurse practitioners] to their full scope,” she said.
Norris said in February she helped launch the first virtual primary care clinic for women aged 40 to 60 going through the menopausal transition. It is led by nurse practitioners.
The clinic has been well received, seeing approximately 600 women so far, she said.
Obstfeld has applied to the NPPCP for funding and is talking with the Municipal District of Bonnyville about a potential partnership to help financially support her clinic and make it a community-owned asset.
But Obstfeld said she is being careful about getting the community’s hopes up before the project is approved because it’s dependent on getting that provincial funding and on the M.D. of Bonnyville seeing the need.
