Concerned about primary care in BC? Learn more below.
BC Government Celebrates UPCC Milestone
It's been one year since the BC Government launched its Universal Prayer and Compassion Centres (UPCCs), ensuring that thoughts and prayers for better health can be equitably accessed by every British Columbia resident.
UPCCs have transformed the healthcare landscape in BC and are being expanded to provide even further benefits. Over the coming months, twenty more UPCCs will be opened to provide greater individual health freedom.
These new coal-powered locations will provide additional self-serve treatment options, the latest Internet search technology, state-of-the-art hand sanitizing stations, and full on-site Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) services.
The government will embark on an unprecedented media blitz coordinated with the rollout of each new UPCC. This will leverage the well-understood principle that if people believe they are getting excellent care, their optimism will improve their health. Legislation was recently introduced making it illegal for regulated health professionals to say anything to undermine confidence in the government.
We've learned to focus our efforts on the public's perception of healthcare rather than follow the misguided elitist direction of self-serving so-called "health professionals" designed to enrich themselves (BC's doctors tricked us into a deal making them the best-paid in Canada). I won't stop fighting for what I personally think is most important.
For patients requiring additional assistance, each UPCC will be fully staffed by licensed practical nurses. Their scope of practice has been expanded to allow independent prescribing, ordering diagnostic tests, and performing cardiothoracic surgery. To protect the public, each LPN must complete an intensive one-week training program.
My wife was a nurse and is now a doctor, so I fully understand everything there is to know about healthcare. You can trust that our family receives exactly the same care as every other resident in BC.
These new and expanded UPCCs continue to deliver on the BC NDP's promise to provide a made-in-BC solution to all residents. They're built on the same strong foundation of leadership and innovation that guided the province so effectively through the primary care crisis, the specialist crisis, the ER crisis, the opioid crisis, and COVID-19, despite the failures of the previous Liberal government.
This is all so exciting and wonderful. It's really quite amazing and very, very inspiring.
I launched bcupcc.ca one year ago (Apr/2022). While the above piece may be satire, in reality, healthcare in BC is failing fast.
Over the year, the BC NDP government has repeatedly and deliberately abdicated its responsibilities, pursued disastrous policies, and misled citizens in order to serve its own needs.
The number of Urgent and Primary Care Centers continues to grow, doubling down on their well-known failures:
- Staffing: Created a poorly-run clinical environment that has failed to attract and retain physicians, despite acceptable compensation.
- Attachment: Failed to come anywhere near meeting its goals of attaching patients to a primary care provider while simultaneously being inaccessible for those needing urgent care.
- Costs: High overhead costs and excessive administrative staff have resulted in a cost per patient visit several times higher than that found in independent clinics.
- Teams: Administrator-led operations that pervert the notion of "team-based care" into situations where divide-and-conquer replaces collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Accountability: Despite massive amounts of data being collected, no representative or meaningful public information is available regarding their financial or clinical performance; data is instead cherry-picked and manipulated.
At the same time, this government has managed to also:
- Mismanagement: Rejected a modernized family medicine compensation scheme that supports spending the necessary time with complex patients, provides support for infrastructure, and preserves professional autonomy in favour of one that still discourages spending time with patients and neglects infrastructure and team-based care.
- Misappropriation: Continued expansion of bureaucracy at the expense of front-line care, supported by billions of unaccountable spending.
- Subversion: Pay lip service to support public healthcare while allowing companies like Telus to provide sub-par clinical care at public expense while increasing burdens on the public system and building demand for private-pay alternatives.
- Authoritarianism: Created legislation to weaken professional regulatory Colleges as part of a larger strategy to harass and silence government critics.
- Propaganda: Become fixated on inventing a press-release-driven fantasy world to distract from and obscure the Hunger Games reality of BC's health system. Grossly misrepresented LFP to the public which will set up family doctors as scapegoats come election time.
All of this can change. But it won't — as long as the NDP believes they can continue to brutally fail on health care and will still have your vote.