KAMLOOPS — A new health centre has officially opened on the North Shore, set to bring longitudinal family doctor care to Kamloops. The facility is being run by Supporting Team Excellence with Patients Society (STEPS), which already operates similar community health centers in downtown Kamloops, Valleyview and Sun Peaks. The new North Shore opening represents years of hard work and dedication and will take a substantial bite out of the family doctor shortage in Kamloops.
It’s estimated 40,000 Kamloops residents are without a family doctor. With the opening of STEPS North Shore Community Health Centre, that number is expected to fall by more than 10 per cent. “Ultimately when this clinic is fully operational it will increase capacity in our region by 4,300 people,” STEPS President Colin O’Leary said. “So we will take those patients into STEPS. And we are focusing really on with this clinic on marginalized populations – women, youth, Indigenous groups, transgender care – so really focusing on those who are disproportionately marginalized in our health care system.”
To open the doors, STEPS received more than $4 million from the provincial government for ongoing operational costs and startup funds.
“The STEPS North Shore Community Health Centre brings us closer to our goal of providing everyone in B.C. with the high-quality health care they need, when and where they need it,” Josie Osborne, B.C.’s Minister of Health said. “This centre is expected to facilitate more than 30,000 patient visits each year in a culturally safe, trauma-informed environment.”
“Something from the very beginning that we also fought for is operational funding, so sustainable operational funding for STEPS, not just operating through the fee for service model, which we do with all of our other clinics. And today, opening up this clinic really represents in that chapter as this clinic is funded through a different model and it does give us for the first time ever long-term sustainable funding,” O’Leary said.
The funding model also allows steps to take care of the administrative burden of running the health centre, allowing doctors to focus on being doctors and not entrepreneurs.
“Definitely our family physicians in this model spend the majority of their time doing family practice; doing medicine. They don’t do the hiring, they don’t do HR, they don’t do the business piece of running a facility. They come in, do their medicine and head home at the end of the evening,” STEPS CEO Christine Matuschewski said.
While the model, along with team-based care of having different specialties all under one roof will help attract health care professionals, retention is just as crucial.
“Recruitment and then sustain and then retain. I think often we forget about the retention side in terms of recruitment,” Dr. Selina Lawrie said. “And really the idea is to create an environment to not just to recruit people but to attract them and have them very vibrant and excited about the work that they do.”
Once fully operational, the community health centre will have a clinical staffing complement of approximately 13.5 FTE health care workers, including two FTE family physicians, three FTE nurse practitioners, 2.3 FTE registered nurses, 1.15 FTE licensed practical nurse, 2.8 FTE social workers and community-health workers, one FTE physiotherapist and an executive director and support staff. STEPS North Shore soft launched late last month as they build up their staffing levels, with the goal of operating six days a week.
“We don’t have enough family doctors and nurse practitioners, which is evident with the number of people who are unattached. So models like this across B.C. and across Canada are excellent,” Matuschewski said.
“This is something somebody has to step up and tackle and we were tired of waiting around for somebody else to do it. It was one of those things of ‘let’s lead by example, let’s tackle this,’” O’Leary said
Find the original article here: https://cfjctoday.com/2025/06/17/steps-opens-north-shore-community-health-centre-with-goals-of-attaching-more-than-4000-patients/
