Colwood, B.C. handles hiring, admin, salaries for local physicians
When Doug Kobayashi discovered his family doctor was moving away in 2022, the Colwood, B.C. mayor refused to wait for provincial solutions. Instead, he decided to make family doctors municipal employees rather than independent contractors.
“As an employee, we want you to be a doctor 100% of the time,” he told CBC News. “No more administration, we’ll look after this. We’ll look after hiring your medical office assistants. We will give you a salary, a fixed salary. We will give you benefits, all the benefits.”
The Colwood Clinic opened earlier this year with Cassandra Stiller-Moldovan as the first physician. Two additional doctors are expected by November, including one from Colorado and another from Ireland, according to Victoria News.
The clinic aims to serve 10,000 Colwood patients with eight family doctors within five years.
Need for healthcare providers
The city allocated up to $500,000 for clinic setup, but Kobayashi tells the CBC that the project remains cost-neutral for taxpayers. When doctors see patients, the city bills the province, collects payment, and pays the physician’s salary while covering clinic costs including rent, overhead, and staffing.
“We believe it is sustainable,” he said. “With the proper scheduling, we’ve proven that it is a revenue cost-neutral project.”
While most Canadians (82.8%) had a regular health care provider in 2023, this proportion was lower than in 2022 (85.8%), according to Statistics Canada data.
The share of Canadians aged 18 to 34 with a regular health care provider (73.6%) was nearly 20 percentage points below that of Canadians aged 65 and older (92.0%).
Community support for doctors
Other communities across Canada have expressed interest in replicating the model, says the CBC. Kamloops, B.C. plans to present a similar proposal to council this fall, while Orillia, Ont. studied the plan before ultimately hiring a physician recruiter instead due to retrofit costs.
Despite enthusiasm, some medical professionals express caution, including Carrie Bernard, president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
"The risk is that if it's just the community doing it on its own, would it be absolving the provinces in some ways from their responsibilities and would it enhance some inequities that already exist between communities at all sorts of levels?" he told the CBC.
B.C.’s Minister of Health expressed admiration for the initiative.
“I really do give kudos to the municipality here for stepping up in the way that they have,” she told Victoria News, adding she hopes the ministry can work with other local governments to create similar projects.
"To me, this is about partnership; this is about recognizing that all levels of government have a role in strengthening our public health-care system.”
