'It would be a disaster': Patients decry closure of family medicine clinic in Hudson, Que.

The impending closure of the only family medicine clinic in Hudson, Que., marks a crushing blow for the community which rallied together for years to launch it.

Frank Royle, a Hudson native, along with a group of concerned citizens and doctors, spent over six years brainstorming and fundraising to secure land for the two-storey brick health complex in the small town northwest of Montreal. 

He and a group of residents bought the land for the clinic in 2008. Since the centre opened in 2011, it has become a pillar of the town, offering first-rate family medicine to the community.  

However, Hudson Medical Centre is set to become one of the casualties of Quebec’s Bill 2 by 2026.

Dr. Tara McCarty, a family doctor at the clinic and one of its co-owners, said the centre will be forced to close on April 1, 2026, after three of the seven doctors practising there decided to leave Quebec in response to the new legislation.

“People need to come to the clinic frequently for care,” Royle said. “It’s not a question of coming once every year or every two years for a check up. They rely on their family physician to keep them alive.” 

The law has been in place since Oct. 25 and ties doctors' salaries to key performance indicators, including the number of patients served and their degree of vulnerability.

Since the Coalition Avenir Québec government invoked closure to rush Bill 2’s adoption, several clinics across the province, including the GMF-R Le Trait d’Union family medicine clinic in Delson, Que., announced they are at risk of shutting down within a year. 

Friday, during question period at the National Assembly, Marie-Claude Nichols, MNA for Vaudreuil, raised the issue of GMFs closing as physicians prepare to leave the province over the bill.

In response, Health Minister Christian Dubé said that it is crucial for doctors to have “all the most up-to-date information as possible before making such important decisions.”  

Royle said that Hudson Medical Centre’s closure would not only lead to the departure of medical professionals but also the relocation of Hudsonites with limited mobility in search of easy access to care. 

“They don’t have cars or they don’t have any means to get there, so what they would have to do is relocate from this village to wherever they could be close to medical support,” Royle said. 

The Hudson Medical Centre’s closure will be a major loss for its 11,000 patients, who are mainly English speakers, according to McCarty. 

It is the only bilingual GMF — the French acronym for family doctor group — in the Vaudreuil-Soulanges region, she says.