Colwood, B.C.’s pilot initiative to employ family doctors as city employees is promising

The Vancouver Island suburban community’s “out-of-the-box” effort is the first of its kind in Canada

The City of Colwood's new initiative aims to recruit and pay family doctors as city employees. (Antoni Shkraba/Pexels)

The City of Colwood’s new initiative aims to recruit and pay family doctors as city employees. (Antoni Shkraba/Pexels)

A pilot initiative to recruit family doctors is set to launch this February in a small B.C. community.

Back in December, Mayor Doug Kobayashi announced the City of Colwood on Vancouver Island had hired its first family doctor to practise under a city-operated medical clinic — the first of its kind across Canada.

This move enables recruited doctors to be a part of a well-rounded and supportive team with a focus on looking after patients rather than worrying about running a business.

The doctors will be paid as city employees, meaning they will have full benefits, pensions, vacations, and other incentives to stay and help patients. While the city is responsible for paying them directly, the program will be funded via provincial revenues billed by the clinic through the B.C. Ministry of Health, which is how doctors in other clinics bill for their time and office assistants. 

While others might consider the initiative a crazy idea, I would call this “out-of-the-box” solution a great step towards the future. 

Colwood, a suburban city outside Victoria, was found to be home to more than 21,000 residents last year and has been rapidly growing and aging throughout the years. The city’s population is expected to increase by 13 per cent in 2026 and by 30 per cent in 2038. 

Kobayashi said in an interview with CBC News that data collected two years ago showed more than 50 per cent of Colwood’s population was without a family doctor. To alleviate this, the city’s initiative aims to hire eight doctors within three years. These doctors will be able to connect with 1,250 Colwood residents.  

A lack of access to family physicians is a reality most of us face in Canada. A study released last year by the Canadian Medical Association Journal found more than one in five Canadian adults reported having no family doctor, a statistic that varies among provinces. In B.C., 28 per cent of residents do not have regular access to a family doctor.

Some experts say it is not necessarily a lack of family physicians that we are experiencing in B.C. and across Canada, Vancouver is Awesome reported. Instead, there’s a lack of resources and support to keep doctors from burning out and switching to other avenues in the medical field that offer more hospital-based work and specialized practice. 

According to the B.C. government, our province has the most family doctors per capita of all provinces, bringing up the number of family doctors practising longitudinal care here to more than 5,400.

Family doctors usually work independently and run their own practices like a business, which entails covering overhead costs and administrative work, occupying time and energy that could have gone towards furthering care for and treating patients. 

If we want every Canadian to have access to a family doctor, our focus should shift to what doctors need to be able to do their jobs properly. The province introduced a new payment model in 2023 — the Longitudinal Family Physician Payment Model — as well as other programs, which are good steps forward to better compensate family doctors and offer an alternative to the fee-for-service model, actions that are much more needed. 

Colwood’s pilot project can hopefully set a precedent for a team-based approach to care for patients and a more well-rounded model of compensation for doctors and medical staff.

This positive change is promising and, if it succeeds, can give hope to current family physicians and aspiring doctors to stay in the field and continue giving the best care that they can for anyone who needs it.