Template or poor data? Leaked documents raise questions about B.C. urgent care centres

B.C.'s Ministry of Health insists a leaked document purportedly containing internal health authority data on the province’s much-hyped Urgent and Primary Care Centres (UPCCs) is a "template" of how information would be presented, even though there are no notations indicating that's the case.

B.C.’s Ministry of Health insists a leaked document purportedly containing internal health authority data on the province’s much-hyped Urgent and Primary Care Centres (UPCCs) is a “template” of how information would be presented, even though there are no notations indicating that’s the case.

The BC Liberal Party obtained the 31-page report with data from an internal dashboard used by health authorities and the Ministry of Health, titled “Urgent and Primary Care Centre Report” outlining information from April to December of last year.

Unlike other leaked internal documents, this one does not contain the words “draft” or “template” anywhere and raises questions about just how many patients are seen at the government-run facilities and whether the ministry of health even knows.

A summary page indicates that over the nine-month period, each practitioner saw only 4.6 patients per day on average, but a ministry spokesperson insists the document is a mockup of a dashboard “created using partial and inaccurate electronic encounter data,” and that “UPCC physician services averaged 26 in-patient visits per day compared to an average of 22 in-person patient visits per day for family physicians in community service locations.”

When the opposition Liberals raised the document in the legislature during question period, the health minister responded with general statements on health care during the twin crises of the pandemic and overdose deaths. He addressed the issue more directly later.

“You can look at information partially or a portion of the visits as they were working on the mockup of the dashboard, I gather, and did that,” said Adrian Dix when asked by CTV News. “The reality is there are a lot of visits to Urgent and Primary Care Centres."

The ministry staffer who reached out late in the afternoon said that early last month the ministry “in good faith reached out to (its) partners to show them a mock-up of a UPCC dashboard.”