Vancouver Island community contemplates offering pensions to attract doctors

The supplies are all in place at Pure Medical Clinic in Colwood, but the beds in the examination rooms remain covered in plastic.

The facility has been largely finished since October, but it still hasn’t opened for patients yet, because it’s missing one key ingredient: doctors.

In fact, the fast growing city of 22,000 people still doesn’t have a single GP practicing longitudinal care, and is taking an innovative approach to the problem. It’s looking at doing the administrative work the clinic – including payroll and human resources – to free up physicians to practice medicine.

“Doctors are good at doctoring, right? The city is good at administering,” said Colwood Mayor Doug Kobayashi on Thursday.

Another bold idea by Kobayashi: offering doctors pensions paid by the province or even, perhaps, partly by the city.

“(If) we do a portion of it, you know, what is the contribution?” he mused. “We could certainly administer how would it work.”

And the idea of a pension just gained steam for many doctors after the federal government proposed new capital inclusion rates that will effectively reduce retirement savings for those small business operators – including doctors – who rely on investments in lieu of a pension.

Jesse Pewarchuk is a physician who also runs a medical clinic in View Royal. He is consulting the City of Colwood on how to operate the Pure Medical Clinic, and how best to attract and retain family doctors in the community. He says the recent, proposed capital gains rules will be a huge problem for doctors if the federal government’s budget is passed and the new rules go ahead as planned.

“For younger physicians, this is devastating for our ability to retire, our ability to save for retirement,” said Pewarchuk on Thursday.

The Canadian Medical Association has asked Ottawa to reconsider the new capital gains rules, which it also says will hamper doctor recuitment and retention.

Pewarchuk says offering a pension could be the solution.

“It would be a game changer,” he says.

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix says compensation packages are negotiated with the group Doctors of B.C., not individual communities. He points to the success of the latest deal, a payment model for doctors that has been credited with attracting more than 700 family doctors province-wide and 179 new GP’s to Vancouver Island this year.

“The place where we negotiate with the Doctors of B.C. is a provincial table, and we’ve just had the most successful round, for patients,” Dix said.

Still, despite inroads, there remain close to 900,000 British Columbians without a family doctor, a problem causing leaders in Colwood to think outside the box about attracting them to their community.