Come next spring, the Altona Clinic could be home to five family physicians.

Don Wiebe serves as Board Chair for the facility and said a new doctor will be joining the local medical team by the end of the October, bringing the current contingent of doctors up to four.

Dr. Moheb Basta, M.D., MBChB, C.C.F.P., currently runs practices in Emerson and Morris and will fill the void left by Dr. H.D. Bueddefeld's retirement at the end of December. He has signed a three year commitment to the Altona Clinic.

Meantime, Wiebe added that the recruitment effort may not be over just yet.

He said the clinic administrator is also chasing a lead on another doctor and, if all goes well, said Altona could be home to five family physicians by spring. By this time Dr. Tahseen Mahdi will have returned from a three month suspension.

"...that certainly makes the emergency services, kind of rounds-out that and prevents some of the disruptions that we've sometimes had," said Wiebe.

He is encouraged by these latest recruitment efforts which he said will make the Altona Clinic much more viable in the future.