The City of Colwood, B.C., on Vancouver Island, is exploring a partnership to bring a new medical clinic to its community.
Currently, Colwood residents do not have access to a family doctor and have to rely on walk-in clinics or the emergency room at the Victoria General Hospital.
“Colwood is exploring an opportunity to address our community’s current physician shortage in partnership with Pure Pharmacy and Aroga Lifestyle Medicine by establishing a medical clinic in a newly constructed facility at the Commons in Royal Bay,” city staff wrote in a release.
Colwood has around 22,000 residents with zero primary health-care providers.
“The (B.C.) Ministry of Health defines a full-time family practice as having 1,250 patients. This means Colwood needs 18 family practitioners to be self-sufficient,” city staff said.
The funding required for the facility would come from Colwood’s Corporate Contingency Budget, according to the city.
Colwood Mayor Doug Kobayashi spoke about the situation during Monday’s council meeting.
“Can you imagine a community where everyone has access to a family doctor? Can you imagine not having to wait hours at a walk-in clinic to see a doctor?” He said.
“This is the vision of trying to establish a medical health clinic in Colwood, more specifically in the Commons in Royal Bay.
“This is the end goal and what is being proposed is a step in the first phase (of) this.”
Global News reached out to the mayor for an interview but staff said he was unavailable to talk about the issue.
He supplied a statement instead. “Doctors are experts in health care, let’s help them focus on health. Cities are good at administration, let us take care of that part,” he said in an email.
In the city’s recent Life in Colwood survey on household prosperity, 69 per cent of respondents expressed “dissatisfaction with access to health care” in Colwood.
“There is no more important issue to many of our citizens’ (than improvement to) access to health care,” the mayor said in the Monday meeting.
The mayor said discussions are ongoing with Pure Pharmacy and Aroga Lifestyle Medicine to bring the facility to fruition, and a proposal is being reviewed.