Colwood council is looking at taking its first steps into the medical clinic business with the help of private-sector partners.
Mayor Doug Kobayashi wants to explore the legal possibilities for a medical clinic in Colwood’s growing Royal Bay neighbourhood that would be fully or partially owned by the city, administered through a non-profit.
The idea formed after many conversations with doctors and the Saunders Family Foundation on how to best attract family physicians to the West Shore, Kobayashi said.
Two companies, Pure Integrative Pharmacy, an Island-founded company now owned by the Pattison Group, and Aroga Lifestyle Medicine, a Victoria-based health-care organization that operates seven clinics across Canada, have expressed an interest in helping to establish the clinic in a new purpose-built facility at Royal Bay’s The Commons commercial centre.
Colwood has said that it needs 18 full-time-equivalent family physicians to provide for its residents’ longitudinal health-care needs.
While a new health centre in Colwood opened in 2022 and the city’s only walk-in clinic — where Colwood’s family doctors used to work — has reopened as of December, more doctors are needed, Kobayashi said. “You can build all the new facilities you want, but if you can’t attract and retain the doctors, you’re not solving the problem.”
Kobayashi said he believes that he found one solution while talking to Dr. Jesse Pewarchuk, medical director and co-founder of Agora, whose wife works as a family doctor.
“Younger doctors are looking for something different,” he recalls Pewarchuk saying. “The old model of where a doctor would open a practice, stay in that practice for 20 to 30 years and then sell the practice — and that was their retirement fund — that isn’t working anymore.”
Taking inspiration from a number of places, including Saanich Peninsula’s Shoreline Medical Society, Kobayashi is proposing that the city get involved with two partners in the private sector to provide an alternative to the traditional family practice.
“We’d have this non-profit organization that we maintain arm’s length from, but we’d own it,” he said. “Taxpayers of Colwood would have right-to-first refusal for the facility.”
If possible, the city would administer payroll and provide human resources services for the health-care facility to save on costs, Kobayashi said.
Aroga would help establish the health-care service, while Pure Pharmacy has expressed an interest in building the health-care facility that would house the operations, he said. The pharmacy chain already operates one location in Royal Bay.
Kobayashi said he presented his idea to Health Minister Adrian Dix twice last year, first in June over video-conference and then in September at the Union of B.C. Municipalities conference in Vancouver.
The ministry is liking what they’re seeing so far and has only taken issue with a proposed pension program that would be available to family physicians working at the proposed facility, he said.
The facility will follow B.C.’s longitudinal family physician payment model while alternative options are being explored, Kobayashi said.
The plan is now ready for business-case development and staff attention, which will cost $30,000 to $50,000 and be funded through Colwood’s corporate contingency budget, the mayor said. “I can’t continue to do this from the side of my desk.”
Legal counsel is needed to ensure that the proposal is within the municipality’s mandate, he said. “Our finance people have to look over the model. This private-public initiative has to make sense.”
Coun. David Grove, who supports the idea, said there is an enthusiasm for health-care solutions on Colwood council. “I think the intensity and the depth and the urgency of the issues requires that we act.”
But it’s important to ensure that any city-supported health facility will not focus on making profits, he said. “We have to hang onto that reality that our health-care system has to be available for everyone.”
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