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.

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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.

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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.