North Vancouver's Park and Tilford Medical Clinic closes permanently after 35 years

The Park and Tilford Medical Clinic will close its doors for the last time on Friday, citing financial pressures that made it impossible to retain family doctors willing to work evening and weekend shifts.

The clinic opened 35 years ago as a walk-in and urgent-care facility launched by a group of family physicians staffed at Lions Gate Hospital. Dr. John Maynard, one of the founding members, said the original purpose was to offer same-day visits and urgent care to both existing patients and North Shore residents without family doctors.

The model worked for decades as younger doctors replaced retiring founders. But over the last four or five years, the fee-for-service model through Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health agreement no longer drew family physicians to offer extra shifts on a walk-in basis. "Most family physicians were compensated more appropriately to stay in their office and see their own patients," Maynard said. "And there didn't seem to be an appetite to increase funding for the kind of care that Park and Tilford offered."

The clinic received temporary relief a few years ago through a short-term "service contract model" with Vancouver Coastal Health. That contract expired just over a year ago and was not renewed. "They were very supportive of us for the last three and a half years," Maynard said, "but financially, they did not see that there was a need to support the clinic offering the care that we provide."

The province's position, according to Maynard, was that the North Shore has a sufficient number of family doctors and residents shouldn't need after-hours or walk-in care. However, Maynard said many patients with their own family doctors still used the clinic because appointments took too long to obtain. "Your child wakes up with an earache," he said, "or you've got some chest pain, and you don't really know if it's serious or not, but you don't want to go to the emergency right away, you phone your family doctor – 'can't see you.' The natural thing to do is go to the walk-in clinic, and we've been sort of the gold standard of walk-in clinics for 35 years."

Maynard said North Shore primary care physicians have been working to ensure patients have access to care elsewhere, and that patient records will be passed on in a timely manner.