Essentia Leaders, Employees Get Sneak-Peek Inside New Cloquet Urgent Care Clinic Opening Next Week
Patients will be welcomed into the urgent care clinic next Monday, with a ribbon-cutting planned for May 23rd.
CLOQUET, Minn.- Essentia leaders and employees got a sneak peek Monday of the hospital’s 73rd clinic to open up in the Northland region — a new Urgent Care clinic in Cloquet.
The new 7,600 square foot urgent care facility has been in the works since 2019, but the pandemic delayed moving ahead to late 2020 and early last year.
Now new labs, radiology and x-ray machines, and the equipment to continue telehealth visits will soon be a short drive away for many Cloquet residents.
And for urgent and primary care — 12 brand new exam rooms.
“So we’ll have family medicine physicians including physicians who do OB here along with an urgent care offering 7 days a week,” said Dr. Thomas Witt, M.D.
“We have a number of our employees who will be staffing this facility who live in the area so community members working in a local community clinic,” the Hospital Administrator said.
Hannah Bjerkness is one of the roughly 15 employees and counting who will staff the new facility. “It’s always been kind of one of my dreams is to be a family practice provider in my hometown.”
A Cloquet native who works in Duluth, the Physician’s Assistant hopes the accessibility makes it easier for patients to seek out any routine care or procedures they may need, in the town about 30 minutes away from the Twin Ports.
“Hopefully it’ll be a nice place that they can get all of their care here instead of having to go and go to this building and this building and this building,” Bjerkness said.
“We’ve seen people who kind of just delay coming in for their routine visits or getting that, just that routine checkup getting, getting medications filled just because of the pandemic and so now being here, getting to keep up on that getting your medications refilled, blood pressure checks,” she said.
The facility cost a little more than $4 million.
Patients will be welcomed into the urgent care clinic next Monday, with a ribbon-cutting planned for May 23rd.
