View Royal is taking the doctor shortage into their own hands, setting aside a large sum of money to recruit a physician.
On Tuesday, March 19th, View Royal’s council decided to commit $30,000 to recruiting a foreign-trained maternity and primary care physician.
The grant is going to the Westshore Primary Care Society (WPCS) to help GROW Health, a View Royal family practice and maternity clinic which has lost three family physicians in two years.
Grow Health operates as a non-profit clinic.
“The shortage of primary care physicians is one of the greatest challenges facing residents of our town and region,” said View Royal Mayor Sid Tobias.
“Community wellness is a town priority and with many of our residents now lacking prenatal and primary care, Council is proud to respond to WPCS’s request for funds to recruit a new physician.”
Up until 2022, the clinic had nine family physicians serving around 7,200 patients, many of whom were “orphaned” by a doctor retiring or moving.
“The importance of recruiting family doctors cannot be overstated,” said WPCS president, Dr. Spencer Cleave.
“It has become a regular occurrence that women are delivering babies with no prenatal care and hundreds of patients, many of them in View Royal, are now without a family doctor.”
In addition to this funding, the View Royal council awarded the following grants this Tuesday:
- $50,000 grant to School District 61 for a crossing guard program
- $7,500 for a food security organization called LifeCycles Project Society
- $3,000 for View Royal Out of School Care Society
- $3,000 for Victoria Sexual Assault Centre
- $2,500 for Vancouver Island South Film and Media Commission
- $2,000 for Juan de Fuca Performing Arts Society
- $725 for ReImagine West Shore Community Society
- $500 each for Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable, View Royal Elementary School PAC, and Victoria Brain Injury Society
- $250 for Access West Shore Society.
Those who want to share their thoughts on the View Royal Budget for the next fiscal year can still do so online, up until April 1st.
Overall, the municipality plans on bumping property taxes up by 6.4% this year to account for some of this spending.
This is an estimated $164 per residential property per anum.
