Since January, the residents of Ucluelet, a community on the west coast of Vancouver Island, have been trying to keep their only family medical practice.
The lease on the Ucluelet Medical Clinic is up at the end of May and despite the practice serving about 3,000 people, the owners said it is losing money and there are no plans to keep it open.
“I think it would be detrimental to the community,” resident Alana Carswell told Global News. “It’s such an important thing for us and we have lots of people here and need the health care, so I’d be sad to see it go.”
If the clinic closes, residents would then have to travel to Tofino or even Port Alberni for medical care.
Mayor Mayco Noel said he is working with the district and Island Health to hopefully find a solution.
“So over the last week here, we seem to have made a lot of momentum and Island Health seems to be working with the local practitioners with some options,” he said.
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In a statement to Global News, Island Health said it is working to improve the delivery of primary care services across the island.
“We continue to meet with the physicians who operate the clinic, and with the Town of Ucluelet to finalize plans on a temporary location for the clinic until a longer-term solution is determined,” the statement reads.
“In the short term, this includes securing leased space in Ucluelet to ensure there is space to continue providing primary care services in Ucluelet. We expect to have more information on that in the coming days.”
The issue sparked a debate in the B.C. legislature during question period Wednesday.
One in five British Columbians are without a family doctor, MLA Shirley Bond said Wednesday.
In a poll conducted last month, 40 per cent of British Columbians who have a family doctor fear they will lose that doctor to practice closure or retirement.
Bond said even in Victoria Wednesday a sign on the James Bay Urgent Care Clinic said “until further notice, we’re not able to offer drop-in doctor urgent care.”
B.C. has the longest clinic wait times in the country but Health Minister Adrian Dix said steps have been made to build out primary care networks and address fundamental issues in the province’s fee-for-service system, which Dix said seems to favour “episodic care and less serious care.”
In early April, the B.C. Health Department announced short-term measures to support primary care on southern Vancouver Island, an area that has been particularly hard-hit by the doctor shortage.
Those measures included $3.46 million in stabilization funding to support five walk-in clinics — enough to fund 10 full-time equivalent family physicians in all the clinics until the end of the year. Meanwhile, the province said it will continue discussions on piloting a new urban locum program to help recruit new physicians to local primary care networks.
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