Bayswater Family Practice is a Family Practice teaching unit affiliated with the University of British Columbia.

Our practice usually has 2 Family Practice residents training with us at a time. The residents are medical doctors who have completed medical school and are in a 2 year postgraduate training program in Family Medicine. Residents usually stay attached to our office for the 2 years of their training.

Residents are always supervised by the family doctor with whom they are working. The supervising doctor will review the details of your visit, the management plan and the written notes in your chart with the resident. Usually your family doctor will also see you at the end of the visit, to review the plan together.

Whenever possible, your doctor will check with you to let you know that a resident physician is working with them that day. Sometimes the resident may introduce themself if your regular doctor is busy with another patient, to avoid keeping you waiting unnecessarily.

We have trained over 30 residents at our office since 1997. Our graduates are working all over BC and Canada providing all types of care including full service family practice, maternity care, emergency care and palliative care. We are very proud of their accomplishments. A number of our former residents now have practices at the office including Drs. Tina Campbell, RhondaVanderfluit, Danielle Stothart and Alyssa Cantarutti.

What about continuity of care?

Your regular family doctor will remain actively involved in your care when you are seeing residents. The resident works in close communication with your doctor to ensure continuity of your medical care. If, on a particular day, you wish to see only your regular family doctor, please let the receptionist know.

The Practicum

At the end of their second year in our office, residents do a 2 week practicum, just before they graduate and start practice on their own. During this time, the residents works in place of the family physician supervisor, doing all the things that your regular family doctor does. Your own family doctor will review your visit with the resident at the end of the day

Your Privacy is Important to Us

Residents involved in your care will have access to your medical records. They follow the same strict code of patient confidentiality as the other doctors in our practice. Occasionally charts are reviewed by residents and/or your family doctor for the purpose of chart audit (quality improvement) to ensure that our practices are meeting current recommended guidelines. If you would like to be excluded from any quality improvement audits, please let us know and we will flag your chart.

We hope that you will find working with our Family Practice Residents as enjoyable as we do. Please let your family physician know if you have any questions or concerns

We provide WorksafeBC related services for our patients. Please let our receptionist know if you believe you have been injured at work BEFORE your appointment. Please have all details and information regarding your claim at your first visit.

Our physicians are fully booked and cannot accept new patients at this time.

Appointments can be made online here or by calling: 604 731-0091. Please note our phone lines are very busy so we recommend booking online if you can. You will receive an email reminder about your appointments booked online.

It is helpful to the smooth running of the office to let the receptionist know the nature of your problem, so that she can schedule the appropriate amount of time for you. A routine office visit is scheduled to last 10-15 minutes. A complete physical examination is booked for 20- 30 minutes. We are able to deal with 1 or 2 problems thoroughly at each office visit. More problems may require another appointment. At the beginning of your visit, please let the doctor know how many concerns you hope to address  and we will do our best to accommodate you as the time allows.

We encourage you to make appointments in advance. However, because health problems can arise quickly, you can usually make an appointment and be seen on the same day for urgent problems. If your own doctor does not happen to be in the office, you may be seen by someone else.

The telephone lines are busiest in the mornings, especially Monday morning. For faster service, phone in the afternoon for non-urgent problems.

We require 24 hours notice of cancellation for appointments. ( 1 business day) The fees for a missed appointments or appointments cancelled at short notice are: regular appointments (15 min) $25, and long appointment (physicals, counselling etc.) $50. Patients who repeatedly miss appointments will be discharged from the practice. Patients who wish to cancel a Monday appointment are required to let the office know before we close on Saturday allowing us to fill the appointment time with another patient.

Patients are now able to cancel their appointments by email by sending in cancellation to baydoc@telus.net. Note: in the email please include patient name, date and time of appointment and doctor with whom patient is booked. Please put “Appointment cancellation” as subject line. The same rules regarding charges for less than 24 hours of notice apply to email cancellations. For cancellation of Monday appointments we require notice by closing (2 pm) on Saturday so that we have the opportunity to book other patients.

In the past 15-20 years we have seen major changes in family practice. When we started practising, most patients in Canada had a family physician. People generally saw their own physician for most medical problems-big and small. With the tremendous growth of walk in clinics we have seen a significant change in the way patients access care in our community. We sometimes hear from patients that they go to walk in clinics for their “quick” items, but attend our office for complicated problems, lists of problems, when they are in distress, or when they need physical exams, PAP tests and ongoing care.

This does not work for two reasons:

1. Lack of continuity of care
2. The payment system is not set up to differentiate between simple and complicated care

Continuity of care is extremely important and cost efficient. Because we know our patients well and are familiar with their past and family medical histories, we often have much more insight into the likely causes of a symptom than a physician who is just meeting you for the first time. Seeing different physicians leads to the duplication of tests and wastes precious health care dollars.

In an effort to provide continuity of care, family doctors have traditionally provided many services for which they are not paid. These free services are rarely provided by physicians in a walk in clinic setting. These include:

1. Keeping track of all your ongoing health issues: As your family doctor we feel responsible to keep up to date on your health concerns. If you are seen in emergency, by a specialist or another doctor at our clinic, we make a point of keeping track of this and following up on ongoing concerns. The family doctor has the central role in ensuring that information from any of your interactions with the health care system (specialists, hospital visits, pharmacists, etc.) is communicated to you and to other practitioners who need to know this information. We often know 2 or 3 generations of a family which provides us with a rich context in which to understand our patients’ concerns.
2. Maintaining and storing your medical chart –we collect reports from all other practitioners you see, tests that are done and your previous physicians. We are responsible to review and act on the information that is sent to us and to store it for at least 16 years after you leave the practice.
3. Organizing your preventive health care-this includes keeping track of all the recommended preventive health interventions including PAPs, mammograms, colon cancer screening, immunization and cholesterol and diabetes testing. We give you reminder calls when you are overdue for a test.
4.  Maintaining a comprehensive medical history-when you join the practice we often spend considerable time documenting your medical and family history. We may spend even more time reading through all charts from previous doctors –sometimes these are 2-3 inches thick! We maintain detailed patient summaries in your chart and keep this up to date.
5. Providing emergency care 24 hours a day, 365 days a year –the six of us share the responsibility of being available at any time for urgent problems. Although the government has funded nurse line and on-call pay for specialists, we do not get paid for being on call!
6. Participating in out of office care: all of our doctors see patients in hospitals, at home and in nursing homes.
7. Completion of forms: the volume of forms to be completed has increased exponentially in the last decade.
8.  Dealing with your medical questions by phone: in a family practice we field dozens of phone calls each day with medical questions. We either answer the calls ourselves or provide an answer to your question to our staff, who then pass the information on to you. We will ask you to come into the office if we feel that we need to see you to answer the question.

Family doctors and walk in clinic physicians are paid the same fee per visit regardless of how many problems are addressed in the visit or how much time you spend with the physician. What has happened is that the complexity of care provided in each visit to a family physician has increased considerably, while walk in clinic physicians see a series of patients with less complex problems and earn considerably higher income. Walk-in clinic physicians are asking the government to cancel  the policy preventing them from getting paid for seeing more than 65 patients a day. At Bayswater Family Practice we are rarely able to see more than 25 patients even on the busiest days because of the complexity of the problems we are dealing with during a typical office visit.  As a result of this vast differential of pay for the same number of hours of work, there has been a mass exodus of family doctors providing full service care and huge growth in the number of walk in clinics. Many patients now find themselves without a family physician at all. When full service family doctors retire, they are usually unable to find someone to replace them. We liken the situation to what happens to your neighbour corner store when Walmart comes to town.

We recognize that there are times when people feel that a walk in clinic provides the convenience of being seen for routine care on a weekend or “right next to their office”. However, this pattern of selectively visiting walk in clinics when it is convenient has made traditional family practice virtually unsustainable in an urban setting. We ask that our patients make a choice. For those individuals where the convenience of walk in clinic care outweighs the benefits of continuity of care provided in our traditional family practice-we ask that you transfer all of your care to the walk in clinic, so that we can give your space in our practice to one of the many patients on our waiting list.

The Doctors of Bayswater Family Practice

Please note that the physicians can make telehealth calls to Canadian phone numbers only. If you submit an out-of-country number you will be billed for any long distance charges and a $25 service fee. Please let our staff know in advance of the visit if you have an out-of-country number so that a video or in person visit can be arranged instead. Also patients who are currently non-residents of Canada need to complete some extra paperwork prior to their visit-please identify yourself to our staff.