Dr. Julie Levesque-Taylor has worked toward establishing a model similar to the collaborative care clinics desire by the province
A Saint Andrews-based doctor has expanded her practice to include more health professionals in an effort to get more people in the community off the waitlist for primary care.
Dr. Julie Levesque-Taylor operates out of the Wellness Centre in Saint Andrews – a clinic provided by the Town of Saint Andrews as part of an effort to provide accessible healthcare to residents.
She moved from Manitoba about four years ago and said she noticed that many doctors were operating alone – meaning there is little room to see patients in a timely fashion or take on more patients over time.
There are roughly 18,000 people in Zone 2 waiting to be matched with a primary care provider – which encompasses southwestern New Brunswick, according to Public Health.
“What it means is that you can’t take on as many people because there’s only so many hours and minutes in the day to be able to do all that work,” she said in an interview with CHCO-TV.
Levesque-Taylor said it usually results in shorter visits or you don’t get as in-depth an assessment.
“I noticed when I first got here that it’s just not sustainable, or it’s sustainable on a very small scale,” she said. “We took on patients, and people came in, they called, they begged, they pleaded, (and) our staff listened … and then there came the heartbreaking moment where we have to start saying no.”
Levesque-Taylor at her clinic in Saint Andrews. (Lukas Kohler/The Courier)
So, Levesque-Taylor leaned into a model with proven success in Manitoba. She got funding through Family Medicine New Brunswick (FMNB), a program administered by the New Brunswick Medical Society (NBMS).
“The goal is to encourage physicians like myself to build primary care teams,” she said.
New Brunswick Health Minister Dr. John Dornan said the FMNB was initiated several years ago, but didn’t get much uptake so some adjustments were made.
“The practice is capitated, which means that the physician gets a certain amount of money for every patient that they take on and then there is monies that are applied or given to the physicians to hire additional healthcare staff, for example a nurse practitioner or nurse,” he said in an interview with The Courier.
He said this is similar to the collaborative care model the government is expanding across the province, with the commitment for 30 clinics by 2030.
Two clinics have been committed to St. Stephen in 2025 and Blacks Harbour in 2026.
He explained collaborative care clinics must have digitized patient records, they must be dealing with a certain number of patients and seeing them within a reasonable amount of time.
All things Levesque-Taylor’s expanded model checks off the list.
She hopes to take 400 patients off the list. (Lukas Kohler/The Courier)
“So, we know that when people work collaboratively, they are way more able to see more patients,” Dornan said, adding they ideally want clinics within a certain geographical area to see residents who live there.
Levesque-Taylor said she aims to have everyone with the postal code beginning with E5B — within Saint Andrews — taken off the list.
“We’ve already started making phone calls, and we hope to take on an extra 400 patients,” she said.
Dornan said the department is negotiating the details to help fund the clinic as a collaborative care clinic, adding it doesn’t change the commitment it has made to the two other regions in Charlotte County.
In March, Dornan said St. Stephen would have a collaborative care clinic by the end of the year.
“St. Stephen is one of those … We have already signed contracts with groups of people who are putting together these collaborative care clinics, so while not everyone has a clinic promised in the next year, yours is one of them,” he said in the legislative assembly in March.
He said many people end up in the emergency departments of the Charlotte County and Saint John hospitals due to the lack of accessible primary care – and the work being undertaken by Levesque-Taylor is part of the overall solution.
Ultimately, she hopes to recruit more doctors to Charlotte County.
“You should be able to go to your family health team home and to be able to have it planned in such a way that when the main doctor is away, there’s someone there covering, and you can see your doctor,” she said. “You don’t have to go to the emergency room unless it’s a life-or-limb.”
The New Brunswick Medical Society (NBMS) said this new collaborative model is how physicians are being trained – and brings advantages for both patients and health care providers.
“Many of the existing team-based clinics in our province today exist because of innovative physicians, like Dr. Levesque Taylor, who have invested their own resources and time to build high-performing teams to offer the best care possible to their patients,” said NBMS president Dr. Lise Babin.
She said she hopes the department will continue the investment in these clinical leaders.
“This is the quickest and most effective way to respond to our current access challenges, and if done right, we can achieve much more than 30 clinics in the coming years,” she said.
— with files from Vicki Hogarth.
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