About Us
Team-Based Practice
Located in Vancouver, Vancouver Family Practice Centre is a team-based community practice that supports the UBC Family Residency Program.
Approach
- Vancouver Family Practice Centre is one of about 10 practices that receive funding from the BC Ministry of Health as a Primary Health Care Organization (PHCO), commonly called Population Based Funding (PBF)
- The Centre receives funding each quarter based on the patients that are registered to one of the 10 practices in the clinic.
- Each practice rotates in providing urgent same day care as our Provider of the Day. The clinic is also available on Saturdays for urgent same day care. Our providers also provide after hours on call care as well.
Population Based Funding
- Population-based funding limits recruitment to patients who are prepared to attend the Centre for all of their primary care needs. If a registered patient visits another primary care clinic or walk-in clinic, the Ministry of Health may process a deregistration and notify the clinic.
- Patients who do not live in our catchment are can not be registered and will have to find a family doctor in the community they live in.
- Our catchment area is the Lower Mainland and parts of the Fraser Valley. It extends from West Vancouver to Abbotsford (Mission is not in our catchment area).
Our Providers
Our clinic consists of 10 practices:
- 12 family physicians (operating as 10 separate practices)
Insights
- The population-based funding model/team approach provides improved continuity of care, and more flexibility in care provision – including the ability for practitioners to handle some patient questions by phone, and the ability for patients to see other clinic providers as needed, e.g., well woman or urgent appointments.
- Patients benefit from comprehensive care, timely access to their own family doctor (or someone within the practice that has access to their information). Centre has a low outflow rate (few patients de-register) and high patient satisfaction.
- Advantages of population-based funding for physicians and multi-disciplinary team include: increased job satisfaction; more time for teaching; funding for the care you provide (rather than the services that can be billed on fee-for-service); and the reassurance that patients are well-looked after in the absence of their own personal primary care provider.
- In an ideal world, there would be: additional disciplines represented on the team, e.g., pharmacists and counsellors, and more team-based chronic disease management.