Prince George’s Standing Committee on Intergovernmental Relations is looking to watch and wait before investigating the possibility of bringing a municipally owned medical clinic to the city.
On the agenda for the meeting was a discussion of the medical clinic that the City of Colwood on Vancouver Island is planning to open later this year.
With funding assistance through the province’s Longitudinal Payment Model, Colwood is looking to provide medical services to residents without a family doctor before expanding operations over the years staff are recruited.
Committee chair Garth Frizzell noted at the meeting that since the agenda for the meeting went out, the CBC had reported on the City of Dawson Creek’s purchase of a local medical clinic for a similar purpose.
“I appreciate that health care is strained right now and we’re looking for different options,” Frizzell said.
“There’s a number of doctors who are attached to the hospital. There’s private practice. There’s a division of family practice here, a lot of different experimentation. I guess this gets at the fact that the traditional model of private practice, they (doctors) have to be not just providing medical care but also running a business and in this day and age, are you able to streamline this?
“I think this merits more discussion and investigation, particularly to find out what drew Colwood to initiate this and some of the political work they did to make this happen.”
Coun. Susan Scott noted that medical service providers must provide detailed reports of what they do to whoever reimburses them for their services. She said she’s interested to see how that element plays out in Colwood.
If the topic is discussed further, Coun. Brian Skakun said he’d like the committee to talk with the Northern Medical Program at the University of Northern British Columbia to see if faculty have any ideas on a funding model and training doctors for a potential Prince George clinic.
While there are a lot of people in Prince George without a doctor, Skakun said he didn’t want the city to have to fill that gap.
Frizzell said he wants to avoid having the cost and responsibility of running medical services downloaded onto the city. While the models being pursued by Colwood and Dawson Creek, he said they’d need to make sure that they would work if implemented in Prince George.
He suggested that the Central Interior Native Health Society would be another organization worth consulting if the idea is pursued.
Eric Depenau, the city’s director of administrative services, suggested that staff could return to the committee with progress updates on how the efforts in those other communities are doing at a regular interval.
With committee members planning an advocacy trip to Victoria to meet with government officials in the near future, Depenau suggested it might be a worthwhile topic to raise with Health Minister Josie Osbourne.
The committee passed a motion requesting staff to report on the matter in meetings during the third and fourth quarters of this year.
