B.C. city starts puts doctor on municipal payroll in bid to attract more physicians
CBC
A new clinic opening early next year on British Columbia's Vancouver Island has a different structure it hopes will help attract and retain family doctors amid an ongoing physician shortage.
The Colwood Medical Clinic will be run not as a private practice, as is normally the case, but by the Greater Victoria municipality itself. The mayor says they have now hired their first doctor and plan on bringing on seven more.
All eight will be paid as municipal employees, receiving full medical benefits, vacation and a pension. They will also be free of the administrative and financial tasks doctors typically handle when running their own clinics, instead handing that work off to the city.
Colwood Mayor Doug Kobayashi said some people called the plan "crazy" when they first proposed it last year, but that it's now drawing interest from municipalities across the country that are also suffering doctor shortages.
"I can tell you right now, the phone, texts, emails, it's just going off like crazy from all the other municipalities," he said. "They call me curious about what the heck we're doing."
Kobayashi said data gathered two years ago showed more than 50 per cent of the population of Colwood was without a family doctor. Each of the eight physicians expected to be hired at the Colwood Medical Clinic will be able to be connected with 1,250 local residents, according to the city.
Kobayashi said while the doctors will be paid as Colwood employees, the program will be funded by provincial revenue billed by the clinic through the Ministry of Health in the same way doctors in other clinics bill for their time and office assistants.
Dr. Cassandra Stiller-Moldovan, who will be moving with her family from London, Ont., to be the clinic's first family doctor, said the new model immediately appealed to her.
"This clinic really matched my core values as a physician and the way I wanted to practise medicine. That really convinced me," she said speaking on CBC's On The Island.
Typically, family doctors run their practices as businesses and are responsible for overhead costs, like office space, staff and equipment.
"We have two full-time jobs," Stiller-Moldovan said. "We have the job of taking care of our patient roster, but also the job of running a small business."
By removing that second responsibility, Stiller-Moldovan said not only will her work-life balance improve, but it will also allow her to focus fully on caring for patients.
"Being able to hand that over to people who know it well and can do it well, where I can just focus on health-care delivery, is very much a stress relief for me and allows me to focus on what I love doing."
Kobayashi said his goal is to connect every person in Colwood to a physician.
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