Burnaby to get one new urgent care, 3 primary care centres

BURNABY (NEWS 1130) — If you live in Burnaby, there will soon be more places to see a doctor.

The provincial government announced today they will be building three primary care centres and one urgent care centre in the city by May. It’s all part of the province’s plan to make more doctors available for people who don’t have one — there’s 40,000 people just in that community alone, according to Health Minister Adrian Dix.

The new urgent centre will be in the Edmonds area, and the three primary centres will be in Brentood/Hastings, Edmonds and Metrotown areas. The province is also planning to build a fourth in the Lougheed area some time in the future.

The urgent care centre will be the sixth in the province.

Dix says it will take a while to measure how they are working.

“The most significant standard is providing primary care to people who live in our community, attaching people who visit our urgent primary care centres to a primary care provider and providing services outside of regular hours,” he says.

So far, he says the primary care centres opened in the province have seen 20,000 patients.

But he says it’s early days – the province is not yet a year into the three year plan to expand team-based community care.

The new Burnaby primary care centres are the second group in B.C. The first were in the Tri-Cities.

In Burnaby, about 68 new healthcare providers will be hired over the next three years, including 10 doctors, 10 nurse practicioners, three clinical pharmacists, and 45 nursing and allied health care professionals to run the new centres.

– With files from Lauren Boothby