Open Health Niverville held their grand opening on Saturday.

Niverville Mayor Myron Dyck says it's great to see the expansion of health services in the community to provide a larger array of services for residents of the area.

"Council did have a role to play but this was truly a partnership of many different people and organizations. The visionary behind this is our Dr. Chris Burnett and his wife Dr. Mairi Burnett. So, it's in partnership with them, it's in partnership with our local RHA, Southern Health-Sante Sud, it's obviously in partnership with the provincial government. With these partnerships that you work hard at and continue, you see something as great as you see here."

Burnett is the director of health and says they previously had good facilities, but were outgrowing the space and wanted to plan for the future.

"One of the principles we've done is we want to grow vertically instead of horizontally. So, that means that we've got probably enough space for another two clinicians in the space we've got during the hours we've got. Our hope is to grow the hours. So, envision physicians coming in to do a morning shift, maybe lasting from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and then doing another late shift. So, we're hoping to have more physicians, just extending the hours to hopefully 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the future."

He notes it feels good to know this building has better accessibility and would be easier to get everyone out if there was an emergency.

"To be quite frank, we could have stayed right where we were but when we retire in X number of years, it would have been very hard to recruit someone into that," Burnett says. "It's good to have all the clinicians together under one roof so I can go next door and speak to public health or quickly go next door to speak with home care."

Burnett says they've been open since the third week in September.