Since March 15, Medical Staff Associations (MSAs), Divisions of Family Practice, health authorities (HAs), and other primary care partners throughout the province have taken and continue to take action to rapidly reorganize and stand up services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the height of the pandemic, the Ministry of Health (MoH) and Doctors of BC were working behind the scenes to clarify how physician planning time would be supported. Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do to protect our patients, residents, and our communities.

A provincially-standardized approach has now been developed for remuneration of physicians’ time and expertise for their planning work during the pandemic. Physicians will be compensated to a maximum of 35 hours in total for active planning performed between March 15 and June 30 at the relevant PMA 2020/21 sessional hourly rate (GPs – $145.65/hour; Specialists – $171.80/ hour), provided the following criteria are met:

• Meetings must be about service delivery planning, re-design and implementation related to provision of patient care at a community, facility, regional and/or provincial level in response to COVID-19.

• The planning work is extraordinary, and goes beyond usual department, division or MSA meeting – planning for physicians’ offices and patients will be not compensated, and

• Physicians are active in the planning – compensation will not be provided for passive attendance at meetings (i.e., town halls, MSA quarterly meetings).

For MSA/VPSA work, the VPSA team will connect with physicians involved in COVID planning to submit invoices on their behalf. For any questions, please connect with Lina Abouzaid, VPSA Project Manager, labouzaid@vpsa.ca.

For work initiated by the health authority (i.e., COVID planning work done within your division/department), department heads are currently working with VCH administration to submit the invoices. For any questions, please contact your department head.

The MoH invoice submission deadline is July 31.