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Second Burnaby urgent and primary care centre opening in Metrotown
Dustin Godfrey
October 31, 2022
Burnaby’s second urgent and primary care centre (UPCC) is opening tomorrow in Metrotown, doubling down on what Health Minister Adrian Dix called the future of primary care.
The UPCC’s purpose is exactly as its name suggests—to provide both urgent care and primary care in a centre with a variety of healthcare professionals on hand.
The urgent care aspect refers to patients who need to be seen within 24 hours but who don’t need to visit a hospital’s emergency department.
The centre will also provide primary care when a family doctor or walk-in clinic is unable to see a patient for things like sprains, infections, and nausea.
Primary care services will be available at the Metrotown UPCC, at 4555 Kingsway, from 9am to 4pm, Monday to Friday, “once all staff have been hired,” according to a news release. Urgent care, meanwhile, will be fully open as of Nov. 1, from 9am to 8pm seven days a week.
An ‘excellent model’ for primary care
In announcing the new UPCC, the 29th in the province, Health Minister Adrian Dix told reporters the centre will open nearly fully staffed. The clinic is expected to staff a total of 23.2 full-time equivalent (FTE) clinical positions, and Dix said 18.2 positions have been filled.
Of those positions, 4.4 FTEs are doctors, 3.5 FTEs are nurse practitioners, 8.9 are registered nurses, and 6.4 are pharmacists, clinical counsellors, and licensed practical nurses. The UPCC will also staff 18 non-clinical staff, Dix said.
“We’ll be ready to go,” he said, also calling the UPCC’s team-based approach “very much the model of the future across primary care.”
“This model is, I think, an excellent model, and it’s proven itself over time,” Dix said.
Peter Barnsdale, regional medical director of primary care integration at Fraser Health, said the doctors at the UPCC would be paid on a contracted hourly service rate.
That’s standard for UPCCs, but it breaks from the traditional pay format for primary care doctors, who are paid on a fee-for-service basis, based on the number of patients seen by a doctor.
“We’ve found that that supported them very well in both the urgent and the longitudinal care,” Barnsdale said of the contracted hourly rate system of pay.
Fixing primary care
Doctors have long advocated for a shift from the fee-for-service model, saying it allows doctors to take their time with patients rather than rush them out the door.
Dr. Carllin Man, who runs a family practice on 10th Avenue, at the border of Burnaby and New Westminster, said that, on top of the lack of a rush in seeing each patient, UPCC doctors are typically paid more as well.
“The doctors that work at a UPCC … [are] probably earning close to double of what I’m earning in the clinic here, with a lot less responsibility in terms of hours worked,” he told the Beacon’s sister publication, New West Anchor in September.
That’s in part because the typical pay model for family doctors in private practice, on top of being outdated, hasn’t kept pace with inflation.
The flat rate is currently $35 per patient, up from around $29 two decades ago, but according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, $29 in 2002 would be nearly $44 today.
And while Man said the model used by UPCCs—specifically, the team-based care—is ideal, he would like to see the province equalizing pay for those in primary care to allow doctors and other healthcare professionals to open up primary care centres of their own.
The BC government is currently negotiating its next physician master agreement with Doctors of BC, which governs how doctors are paid for their services. And Dix acknowledged that there are “some challenges” with the fee-for-service model.
“There’s also historically a reason why it’s been in place so long, some advantages to that,” Dix said, though he didn’t elaborate on what those advantages were.
“So we’re working through those changes with the Doctors of BC, and I’m very optimistic about how it’s going.”
The UPCC opening up in Metrotown will be about 696 square metres in area, with two consult rooms, six exam rooms, one group therapy and education room, an assessment and triage room, and “additional areas for office administration and collaborative workspaces,” according to a news release.