Through its Primary Care Redesign work, VCH-Vancouver Community will open a new Primary Care and High Needs Stabilization Clinic at Raven Song Community Health Centre later this year.

By establishing this new service, VCH-Vancouver Community will be able to provide high needs and complex clients — including vulnerable youth — with the health care they need in a specialized, fully integrated service setting. The clinic will provide care 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

Additionally, resources from this redesign will allow us to increase services for youth at the well-established inner-city youth clinic — located at Three Bridges Primary Care Clinic in downtown Vancouver — and the East Van Public Health Youth Clinic, located at Robert and Lily Lee Family Community Health Centre.

“By targeting and centralizing our existing primary care services, we’re certain that we can achieve better health for vulnerable youth and people with complex care needs — such as addiction, complex mental health needs and multiple, chronic conditions — while reducing emergency department visits and lengths of hospital stays,” said Laura Case, Executive Director, Vancouver Community.

In advance of these service improvements, though, Vancouver Community’s Primary Care leadership team is working to reorganize VCH funded and contracted primary care at the clinic level. This work will involve redirecting some of the contracted dollars from Mid-Main Community Health Centre as well as carefully shifting services to Raven Song from other VCH operated primary clinic sites in Vancouver; namely Pine, South, Pacific Spirit and Evergreen.

“VCH-Vancouver Community is not closing community health centres or cutting services for complex, high need clients,” said Dr. David Hall, Medical Director, Primary Care, Vancouver Community. “We are now working with the doctors at our primary care sites to determine where they fit into this new model of Urban Primary Care as well as to develop care plans to help our more vulnerable clients.”

While the most complex patients will continue to receive their services from a VCH funded primary care clinic, clients with lower needs currently being seen at the VCH owned and operated Pacific Spirit, South and Evergreen primary care clinics will be transitioned into the care of traditional “fee for service” physicians.

This transition will occur gradually and with adequate support so that clients can maintain continuity of care in a setting that better matches their need.

Primary Care Redesign is in response to recent external and internal reviews that showed Vancouver’s urban primary care sites were not meeting their mandate to serve an at-risk patient population.

Those services, originally intended for clients with complex care needs and marginalized youth, were increasingly being used instead by patients who did not require that level of care.

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