October 2025 marked exactly 20 years since Dr. Mairi Burnett came to Niverville to practice family medicine. That same month, she sent out letters of her impending retirement to the many patients she’d acquired over the decades.
Six months later, on April 9, 2026, she bid farewell to the staff at Open Health Niverville and hung up her stethoscope for one last time.
“Originally, I thought I would retire from family practice but keep my license,” Mairi says. “And then I could maybe do walk-ins. But the closer it got, the more I realized that I was ready to retire. I realized that what I really like about family medicine is the relationships [you build] and the continuity.”
Over her four decades of practice, she says much has changed. When she graduated in 1981, MRIs didn’t exist and CT scans were used mostly by neurosurgeons and only for scanning the brain. Stents weren’t in use for artery blockages and cartilage removal in the knee resulted in weeks off work. Today, she says, patients practically jump off the table and go.
“Forty years ago, you gave up a lot of stuff to be a doctor,” she adds. “When I qualified, a 70-hour workweek was a short week and a 120-hour week was a long week. That’s not allowed now because of safety issues. You wouldn’t want a pilot who’d been flying that long.”
But things have swung in the other direction, to some degree. Many family practitioners now keep part-time hours. When it comes to work-life balance, it’s not a bad thing.
She wonders, though, if something has been lost in terms of building long-term patient relationships and providing multigenerational care.
Mairi began her career in Scotland. Eventually, after marrying her partner, Dr. Chris Burnett, the couple moved to Africa to practice there. Here they had their first two sons.
Further travels took them to Albania, where they opened a clinic in their home to provide medical care to missionaries and others needing medical services. Their third son was born here.
They eventually relocated to Britain, just in time for the country to introduce a program to return female doctors to the workplace. For Mairi, it meant accessing part-time options while raising her three sons.
A couple of years later, the couple moved to Manitoba. Mairi practiced part-time in Boissevain while Chris took a position with Manitoba Health. That’s when someone from the southeast health region board invited the Burnetts to consider setting up a practice in Niverville.
Their first connections, at the time, were with former mayor Gordon Daman and CAO Jim Buys.
“At that time, there were two doctors coming up from St. Pierre two days a week to do clinics,” Mairi says.
These doctors were under short-term contract, though, and soon Niverville would be without doctors.
The space Drs. Mairi and Chris took on was small, comprised of one office and two clinic rooms at the current location of the primary Growing Minds Childcare space. These were the very earliest days of what would become the Heritage Centre campus.
For Niverville, acquiring the Burnetts was a massive win. They moved their family to Niverville and took on management of the clinic. They were also among the first doctors for many who could be referred to by their first names, modelling a modern kind of approachability.
For the Burnetts, who were promised room to grow as they needed it, the clinic fulfilled a dream to create an integrative medical facility with wraparound service providers who worked as a collective team for the patient’s best outcome.
In 2017, the clinic moved into a brand-new space where all service providers had offices and clinic rooms in a dedicated location. They called it Open Health Niverville.
“There were 12 rooms and a lab,” Burnett says. “We worked with the regional health authorities so that we could be in the same building. We’d have [shared] reception staff so that people coming in would not know who was regional health and who was a private physician.”
The journey wasn’t free of struggle. In 2019, Dr. Mairi was diagnosed with cancer, forcing her to step away from her practice for a time to undergo treatment and heal.
What makes that time especially memorable for Mairi was the support she received from her patients and the community as a whole.
“The number of people who sent get well cards and said ‘We’re praying for you,’ that was an incredible support. Both in my work and personal life, it showed me that I had impacted people.”
With her retirement announcement, she says she’s experienced a similar response.
Since Mairi retired, Dr. Chris has decided to follow suit. He’ll remain serving his patients at Open Health until August.
The couple plans to live out their retirement years in Niverville. After the completion of a long and full medical career, Mairi is taking it easy for a time, waiting on direction as to how to fill the hours going forward.
“I’m waiting to see what God wants me to do,” she says. “We’ve been very much led by God in every single step of our lives.”