Region loses third walk-in clinic this month over lack of doctors
A Cook Street Village walk-in clinic has closed its doors, citing a lack of physicians.
It’s one of three clinics shutting down this month in the capital region.
Dr. Ian Bridger, medical director for five family-practice walk-in clinics in the region, said it was a difficult decision to close the Cook Street Village Medical Clinic walk-in, which serves about 5,000 patients as an urgent clinic.
“Without some kind of miracle, it will be permanent,” Bridger said. “We’ve only just closed and we’ve closed very reluctantly … we’ve just run out of physicians willing to do that job.”
About 900,000 people in B.C., including about 100,000 in the south Island, are without a family physician.
James Bay Medical Treatment Centre in Victoria closed in late February to all but complexcare and vulnerable patients, Eagle Creek Medical Clinic in View Royal and Colwood Medical Treatment Centre have both announced plans to close their walk-in services on April 15, displacing thousands more patients.
Some doctors leaving private primary-care practices cite rising operating costs and a lack of alternate forms of payment — such as salary and contracts — to the traditional fee-for-service model, where a physician bills the Medical Services Plan $31.62 per patient visit. The average doctor might pay about $85,000 to $100,000 annually in overhead.
The medical director for Cook Street Village Medical Clinic said he’d reopen the clinic tomorrow if he could find a doctor who would work there. “Those 5,000 [patients] now have nowhere to go.”
On Wednesday, Dr. Katharine Smart, head of the Canadian Medical Association, called on the federal government for a plan to address the “human health resource crisis” of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals leaving or retiring “in droves.”
The Canadian Medical Association and other groups want a federal strategy, or even agency, to count, track, train and retain health professionals to keep Canada’s health-care system afloat.
Smart said the initial cost to get the idea off the ground would be as little as $2 million.
Provinces have clamoured for a sustained increase in federal health transfers so they can make more systemic improvements to their systems, asking the federal government to grow its share of health-care costs to 35 per cent from 22 per cent — an increase of about $28 billion annually.
B.C. Green Leader Sonia Furstenau said the health care system is at a “breaking point” and called on the provincial government to modernize it by funding more alternate payment models, providing “immediate relief” for existing primary-care family practice doctors, and recruiting more physicians into family practice.
“We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to supporting physicians currently providing that longitudinal care and we need to know that when they retire, their clinic will continue to care for patients,” Furstenau said at a news conference.
There’s currently a generation that has never had the experience of having a family physician or nurse practitioner, she said.
“People have been without access to consistent quality health care for quite some time, and it’s reaching a breaking point.”
The provincial government has been opening Urgent and Primary Care Clinics, which provide care needed within about 48 hours to take pressure off hospital emergency rooms, and aim to attach some patients with family physicians. The clinics offer doctors the option of being paid a salary or employed on a contract basis.
B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix said alternate payment arrangements with physicians have risen from $500 million in 2017-2018 to $758 million today. “We have been working in that direction, working with the Doctors of B.C., working with family practices to do so.”
Many younger doctors want to be paid a salary or other non-fee-for-service form of payment, making it hard for family practices working under a fee-for-service model to recruit them, he said.
The province is working with physicians in the Victoria area on the issue, said Dix.