The Colwood Clinic

The Colwood Clinic will be a new clinic providing family doctors to residents of Colwood. The family doctors will be recruited and employed by the City of Colwood, and the clinic will be leased and managed by the City of Colwood

The clinic will be located within an existing clinic space at Pure Integrative Pharmacy in the Royal Bay Commons in Colwood.  

Residents of Colwood who do not have a family doctor should add their name to the Health Connect Registry provided by British Columbia’s Health Link BC program. From there, residents who have a Colwood postal code will be matched with a family doctor from the Colwood Medical Clinic. 

The clinic is expected to open in 2025. 

The Province continues its efforts to connect residents on the Health Connect Registry throughout BC with family doctors as spaces become available.  Family doctors at The Colwood Clinic are reviewing the registry list provided by the Province and are expected to begin connecting with patients who have a Colwood address before the end of January 2025. Together our efforts are supporting broad community well-being.

The clinic is expected to open with one doctor and will ramp up to eight physicians by the end of year two. When fully staffed with eight physicians, the pilot project has the capacity to provide doctors for 10,000 Colwoodians. 

No, residents will not pay directly for care. The family doctors will be municipal employees of the City of Colwood and will be paid through the city, funded by Provincial revenues billed by the clinic through the Ministry of Health. This is a new way of delivering care within the existing system. This innovative model is made possible by the revolutionary improvements made by the Ministry of Health in 2022 when they introduced the Longitudinal Family Physician Payment Model. 

The business case shows the clinic being revenue positive within five years, with no ongoing local government tax support projected. Start up costs will be supported by existing City reserve funding that clinic revenues are projected to repay within five years. The City will need to establish a new City department to manage the administration of the Clinic. The Provincial funding model ensures this department will not require ongoing municipal tax funding. 

The clinic will first prioritize Colwood residents without a family doctor. When there is further capacity in the clinic, there may be an opportunity for residents with an existing family doctor to change to one at the Colwood Medical Clinic. 

Doctors will be recruited from throughout Canada and the international community such as the UK. The intention of the recruitment plan is not to recruit doctors from other family practices in Greater Victoria. The Colwood Clinic also represents an opportunity for local doctors who have left family practice for other opportunities such as telehealth to come back to family practice.

The Colwood Clinic model will appeal to physicians who are passionate about health and quality of life and want to focus solely on providing exceptional care without the added costs, pressures and drawbacks of owning and operating a business. Doctors will model work-life balance with the benefits of maternity and parental leave, vacation coverage that ensures consistent care for patients, a professional network of medical colleagues and administrative support, as well as appropriate remuneration and pension. 

Interested physicians can reach out to our Medical Director at ColwoodClinic@Colwood.ca

The Colwood Clinic pilot project is a first step in connecting Colwoodians who don’t have a family doctor with a primary care physician based on the Longitudinal Family Physician Payment Plan which will fund the clinic.

The City looks forward to exploring opportunities for Nurse Practitioners as the federal and provincial governments amend public health plans to enable Nurse Practitioners to bill the public health care system the same way doctors do, starting April 1, 2026.

Provincial revenues billed by the Clinic through existing Ministry of Health systems will fund clinic operations. Specifically, physicians will assign payment for their services to The Colwood Clinic, allowing them to be paid by the municipality as employees with pension and benefits. 

This is an opportunity to weave together the strengths of each level of government to do more than treat symptoms, but to get to the root of the social determinants of disease. Municipalities are uniquely able to impact many of those determinants through enhancements to parks, recreation, public spaces, active and public transportation, and housing and development decisions. It also offers the opportunity for Colwood to provide the Province with a template to create a pathway for other communities to follow.

The City of Colwood’s Household Prosperity Survey in 2023 identified access to healthcare as the top priority for residents in Colwood. This pilot project aims to support the Province of BC’s goals with the Health Connect Registry and provide Colwood residents with a family doctor as soon as possible. 

The Canada Health Act is Canada's federal legislation for publicly funded health care. It’s primary aim is "to protect, promote and restore the physical and mental well-being of residents of Canada and to facilitate reasonable access to health services without financial or other barriers."

The Canada Health Act lays out the conditions that each province must meet to receive federal cash transfers for health. Provinces in turn, enact laws that establish which services will be publicly funded. Provincial laws are designed to be consistent with the criteria of the Canada Health Act.

In B.C., the purpose of the Medicare Protection Act is to preserve a publicly managed insurance plan (the Medical Services Plan) consistent with the Heath Canada Act in which access to necessary medical care is responsive to patients’ needs and designed to foster improvements in individual and health outcomes and ongoing value for money for all taxpayers.

We know from our 2023 Household Prosperity Survey that the single most important issue to many Colwood residents is that they don’t have a family physician. The City is seeking to directly address the principle of accessibility contained in both the Canada Health Act, and the Medicare Protection Act by increasing the capacity of Colwood residents to access a primacy care physician.

This pilot project represents a new way of delivering care within the existing medical system, made possible through innovative improvements made by the Ministry of Health with their Longitudinal Family Practice program.

The City has been working with the Province through the South Island Division of Family Practice and our Primary Care Network to have the Provincial “Heath Connect Registry” populate our medical clinics patient panel. The Province will provide to the City a list of residents with a Colwood postal code who are currently unattached to a primary care physician. The Colwood Clinics patients will be populated from that list. Attaching patients from within a specific geographic area is an approach commonly followed by primary care clinics, while urgent care does not use this approach.

The City is working within the MSP system that the Province has established to provide medical care to the residents of BC to address what its residents have described as a barrier in access to primary care physicians. Through addressing this barrier, the City is working to the advance the objectives of the Canada Health Act and Medicare Protection Act.

Measures of success include successful recruitment of one physician in 2024 for a clinic opening in 2025, ramping up to eight doctors with 1250 patients each by 2028 to serve 10,000 Colwood residents. 

A physician from Aroga who is locally based, grew up in Colwood, and attended Dunsmuir Middle School approached the City with the clinic concept. The City was able to develop its business case based on that concept.  

While primary care is the critical starting point, Colwood’s long term goal for citizen well-being is to create an integrated, functioning, community system that creates health. Aroga Lifestyle Medicine is the first to adopt the emerging concept of holistic lifestyle medicine in Greater Victoria and is currently the largest medical organization that provides these services to patients in BC. Patients of the Colwood Clinic will benefit from having a professional network of physicians and rotating specialists such as internists embedded into the clinic to decrease wait times and increase positive outcomes.