Frustrated trying to find a family doctor in BC?
You are not alone. Finding doctors that are accepting new patients in BC is a chronic problem. It is estimated that 15% of patients that would like a family doctor don’t have one.
However doctors with openings are out there. Doctors are moving here from other countries, newly graduated family doctors are joining clinics and patients come and go all the time, so openings do occur regularly, but how to find them?
Find a Doctor BC uses the power of crowdsourcing and the Internet to lower the burden on patients and doctor office staff, while providing patients the best chance to find a family doctor in their area. Use of the website is free, but to help keep the lights on we also offer a notification service for $4.99/month so you can be notified via email when a doctor in your area starts accepting new patients.
The usual advice to those looking for family doctors is to phone around to doctor’s offices in their area and inquire. This rarely works on the first try, so patients need to keep calling back regularly, perhaps every 2 to 4 weeks. so when a doctor does start accepting new patients, they find out about it. This is a huge burden on patients and doctor’s office staff. Or people use walk in clinics that also provide family doctor services, but about 2 in every 3 family doctors in BC don’t practice at walk-in clinics.
What does Find a Doctor BC provide?
Access to the most easy to use and most complete listings of all clinics offering primary care practitioners.
Here at Find a Doctor BC we have developed a database of all the family doctors and nurse practitioners in the regions we serve and keep track of their status as far as accepting new patients. The data regarding clinics accepting new patients comes from users. After users contact a clinic they are asked to fill out a small form so what they learned can be shared by all, thus preventing everyone from having to call all the clinics.
The site is fully moderated. Right now it is open to all without registering, but this may change if spam becomes too much of a problem.
Regions served
- Vancouver Island
- Sunshine Coast
- Lower Mainland
- Fraser Valley
- Thompson Okanagan
- Kootenay
- Cariboo
- Northern BC
Notification Service
To help pay for the site, we offer a paid service for $4.99/month that will notify subscribers via email when a doctor in their area is accepting new patients. It is billed monthly and you can cancel anytime. To sign-up, click here
If you have comments or concerns, please let us know.