Colwood’s mayor says a new municipally administered medical clinic should be fully staffed and open within two years, after council unanimously approved the plan Monday night.
The pilot project involves hiring eight family doctors, four medical office assistants, one medical clinic director and an operations manager for the clinic in leased space in Colwood Commons, the hub of the growing Royal Bay neighbourhood. The space will be leased from Pure Integrative Pharmacy.
“It’s execution time now,” said Doug Kobayashi. “We are very confident we are going to be able to hire all eight doctors. We’ve given ourselves two years, but we don’t think we’ll have to wait that long.”
The city could be halfway to its goal by next spring, said Kobayashi, adding ads seeking staff will be placed almost immediately.
One physician has been secured and two more from Ontario have visited Colwood and expressed interest, “but until we have employment contracts signed, we don’t have anything,” Kobayashi said.
The plan is for the municipality to employ the family physicians on salary — salary amounts haven’t been finalized — while the clinic is run by a non-profit group.
The model is based on Island Health-leased and operated clinics where physicians are salaried, as well as on Urgent Primary Care Centres and non-profit-run Community Health Centres.
Kobayashi said the city was also inspired by Shoreline Medical clinics in Sidney and Brentwood Bay. Opened by a charitable organization created in 2015, the clinics have grown to include roughly 25 family physicians, a nurse practitioner, nurses, a pharmacist and mental-health-care worker, after starting with just five doctors.
While there are other non-profit models, Kobayashi said he’s not aware of any other municipality doing what Colwood is doing with its clinic.
“This is groundbreaking. No one’s done this before,” he said. “We are thinking way outside the box with a lot of input from many family doctors who say it’s all possible.”
Physicians will be paid under the province’s new longitudinal family physician payment model, which provides an alternative to the old fee-for-service model. The new model came into effect in February 2023.
Taking over the business aspect of family practice is important, Kobayashi said, since a bigger job than attracting physicians is retaining them.
After talking with physicians, the city concluded that if it could take over some of the paperwork and business aspects of the practice and provide a pension and benefits, it might encourage physicians to stay, he said.
The mayor said the city is able to handle the paperwork, pensions, human resources and financial services and benefits, while a non-profit can take on day-to-day operation of the clinic.
“The city is really well-equipped to do administration,” said Kobayashi. “We are taking away all the business side for the doctors so they can practise being a physician eight hours a day.”
Start-up costs of $500,000 from the city’s reserve funds have been budgeted for the pilot, said the mayor, adding the clinic model is in line with the Canada Health Act and provincial laws.
Plans suggest the clinic will be able to take on 10,000 patients from an estimated 14,000 people in Colwood who currently don’t have a family doctor.
Potential patients who sign up for the province-wide Health Connect registry would be connected based on their Colwood postal code. The city is working with the non-profit South Island Division of Family Practice on the pilot project.
Kobayashi said he presented the city’s pilot plan to Health Minister Adrian Dix and deputy minister Stephen Brown at last year’s Union of BC Municipalities and it was received well.
The mayor said the longitudinal family physician payment model, developed between the Health Ministry and the province’s doctors, “gives us flexibility to do this pilot project.”
Kobayashi, who grew up in Colwood, said he returned to his hometown in 2010 after working as an aeronautical engineer and aerospace executive internationally and in Canada since 1976.
But it wasn’t until 2017 when he had heart failure followed by a diagnosis of diabetes — “both preventable if I had a family doctor” — that he was finally attached to a family physician.
“That’s the only reason I have a family doctor today,” he said. “I have seen the suffering, the pain. I’ve seen the waiting.”
In a 2023 Colwood survey, 69 per cent of residents said they were dissatisfied with health-care services. Of those, 83 per cent said they had difficulty finding health-care providers.
The province has said about 250,000 people in B.C. have been connected to a family doctor through the online Health Connect registry, promising the remaining 300,000 patients still on the registry would be connected to a family practice by the end of next year.
