B.C.’s Health Minister and the president of the Doctors of B.C. are set to make a “major” announcement this morning about a deal they have been negotiating since the spring.
Talks around the Physician Master Agreement, which expired in March, have been focused on family doctors as the government look for ways to keep primary care clinics and walk-ins open and retain and recruit new physicians.
The Doctors of B.C. has said one of its priorities is to offer alternative compensation models — such as salary and contract — while expanding the traditional fee-for-service model to better compensate doctors for their time and services. The fee-for-service model remunerates physicians a base fee of about $32 per patient visit.
Dr. Ian Bridger is one of many Greater Victoria family physicians and clinic operators who will be listening to the announcement this morning.
Bridger runs five family practice clinics that offer traditional appointment-based family practice for enrolled patients plus walk-in clinics open to anyone. About 85 per cent of visitors to the walk-in clinics don’t have a family doctor and about 15 per cent are people with acute medical problems who might otherwise visit the emergency department, he said.
“We all expect the new physicians deal to be all about attracting family doctors back to traditional one-on-one family practice so that we might over time be able to provide more people with attachment to a family doctor,” said Bridger.
“We know that having your own family doctor is the ideal situation, and having a deal that makes doing that work competitive from a financial point of view will go a long way towards eventually helping to get back to the point where nearly everyone has a family doctor.”
It’s estimated that about one million people in B.C., including 100,000 in the south Island, don’t have a family doctor.
Earlier this year there were a series of walk-in clinic closures caused by physicians unwilling to work for the pay offered by fee-for-service MSP payments.
The Health Ministry spent $3.46 million to keep five south Island walk-in clinics open — Esquimalt Medical Clinic, West Coast Family Medical Clinic in Sooke, West Saanich Medical Clinic, and Shoreline Medical clinics in Brentwood Bay and Sidney.
The funding did not stop the closure of View Royal’s Eagle Creek Medical Clinic walk-in, the Colwood Medical Treatment Centre, or Cook Street Village Medical Clinic.
While the province and doctors have been negotiating at new deal, $118 million in temporary stabilization funding was offered in August to individual physicians in primary-care clinics and walk-ins. Most of that has been allocated to more than 3,000 physicians, with a remaining $11 million to be given out in November.
Dr. Ramneek Dosanjh, president of Doctors of B.C., called the short-term funding to keep practices open “an important first step.”
In August the province and Doctors of B.C. said general agreements had been reached on key components of the new payment model, including the time spent by family physicians providing primary care services, patient encounters, complexity and attachment.
The province has also been developing measures to support and improve access to primary care, including improving recruitment and retention of health-care providers and providing additional resources to increase training capacity.
