Tag Archives: Cortes Health Centre

Health

Proposed Discovery Island Community Health Centre.

 The Quadra, Cortes, and Surge Narrows communities, as well as the Klahoose and We Wai Kai First Nations, have sent the BC Ministry of Health an application for funding to set up a Discovery Island Community Health Centre. 

“It offers stability for practitioners. It offers leadership stability through a joint board and a hired executive director. It offers some economies of scale in terms of practitioners being shared and supplies being shared. It offers a shared medical record between the communities. Potentially, one of the things is using video conferencing as opposed to an in-person visit, if that’s appropriate. It’s community driven, it doesn’t involve Victoria telling remote communities what works for them, because that generally doesn’t work for them,” explained Bernice McGowan, President of the Cortes Community Health Association (CCHA) and a member of the planning committee for the proposed Health Centre. 

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Health

Changes Coming To The Cortes Medical Clinic

British Columbia’s health care crisis has reached Cortes Island. A number of complex factors led to the resignation of all three doctors working out of the Cortes Island Medical Clinic. Their contract ends on Sunday, March 31, 2024. 

“The  physicians that we’ve had in our physicians group are moving on to do things in their own lives. They’re starting practices elsewhere and it no longer fits for them to come here,” explained Bernice McGowan, on behalf of the Cortes Community Health Association (CCHA) board.

“We will not be shutting the doors of the clinic on April 1st.  That’s not in the foreseeable future. If our physicians leave, the worst case scenario is that we have a whole bunch of locums coming and we’ve been in this position before, where the only people that we had covering the practice were locums.” 

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Community

Summer fundraiser launch to improve walking and bicycling trails

CKTZ News, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The Cortes Community Housing Society (CHS) is launching a summer fundraiser to expand and improve the trail system in the south end of Cortes Island.

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Forests, Parks

The Rainbow Ridge trail system

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You are probably going to hear a lot about the Rainbow Ridge trail system over the course of the next month.  

“We’re going to be doing a big publicity campaign to let the community know how we’d like to reroute the trail system,” explained Project coordinator Sandra Wood.

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Health

How Island Health Responds to a COVID situation

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Part one of a series of three articles: Michelle Crosby talks about administrative matters and how Island Health responds to a COVID situation.

Cortes Island responded to the first news of the pandemic with a series of ZOOM conferences, in which various sectors of the community reported on their preparations, status and plans. The last of these meetings was held on June 9th, a day when Island Health reported there were no COVID cases anywhere on Vancouver Island. That situation has changed. According to statistics released by the BC Centre for Disease Control, there were 16 new cases in the Greater Campbell River Health Area during November. Some of these were on Cortes Island, where there had not previously been a publicly acknowledged case. While there are currently no known active cases on Cortes, there were 31 throughout North Vancouver Island yesterday and Island Health does not identify specific communities, or islands, for individual cases. The virus is still spreading. On December 10th, Cortes Island’s Regional Director, Noba Anderson, convened a ZOOM conference of several key Cortes community and Island Health leaders.

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