Kamloops on track to open city-owned medical clinic

Kamloops may become the second city in B.C. to have a city taxpayer owned medical clinic.

City council agreed at a meeting May 6 to have staff come back with a business plan aimed at hiring family doctors as thousands in Kamloops go with a general practitioner and sit on the primary care waitlist.

In the Vancouver Island community of Colwood the municipality is on track to hire eight doctors for the city with a population of around 20,000.

“There’s a good success model in place we can follow and grow upon,” Kamloops councillor Kelly Hall said. “It’s innovative, it’s creative and it’s a solution to bring much needed doctors to our city.”

Colwood mayor Doug Kobayashi said officials from several BC municipalities have inquired about their city-owned model, and Hall happened to be one of them.

Hall said he reached out to several other people to plan out how such a clinic could be funded and how it would function once opened.

Though the details are yet to be worked out, he said it would be a self-funded model likely taking on the operational side so doctors can focus on health care.

“The hope and understanding is that it has zero taxation,” he said.

Hall also said Colwood aimed at hiring doctors from outside BC in order to avoid pulling crucially-needed doctors from communities within the province, something Hall suggested could be a local policy for Kamloops.

He said there are American doctors looking to move north, presenting a potential hiring opportunity.

How long staff will take to propose a business plan and how long it could then take to open a city-run clinic isn’t clear, but council did unanimously approve Hall’s proposal.

— With files from The Canadian Press.