Family Physician – Maternity Care – St. Paul’s Maternity Clinic

St. Paul’s Maternity Clinic is located in St. Paul’s Hospital, a 5-minute walk from the maternity unit. They are a specialty clinic that is supported by 2 lovely administrative staff, full-time staff of eight physicians who are very supportive and happy to mentor around clinic/hospital processes, as well as clinical questions and billing etc., three midwives who currently help provide intrapartum care and postpartum care to patients, an excellent collaborative relationship with the colleagues at SPH including nurses (including complex care case management), lactation consultants, obstetricians, pediatricians, internal medicine, and their own breastfeeding clinic and lactation consultant (which runs in the clinic space Mondays and Fridays). They also have an RN who is also a lactation consultant to support prenatal and postpartum clinic visits.

Other relevant information:

The clinic does not pay overhead. Appointments are booked every 20 minutes from 8:30-4:30 M, T, W and F and from 12-6pm on Thursdays. The hours are flexible. Patients are booked every 20 minutes (30 for complete physical examinations). Billing in clinic can either be through FFS or through the new LFP payment model. Take home pay with the LFP model for a clinic day is typically between 1200-1400.

Call is done from home. If the physician is on day call, they are responsible for rounding on the postpartum dyads in the morning to ensure timely discharge. As well, they are responsible for managing the inbox of results, including calling patient to follow-up abnormal results (this typically results in some income through phone calls etc. through the day). If the physician is interested, virtual appointments and virtual intake appointments can be added to the call day in advance (not mandatory). Approximately 30-35 patients are delivered per month. Nurses are able to discharge patients in early labour. Billing on call is currently done through FFS but a new on-call billing option should be available by Summer 2025 and the clinic can provide more information about this as it is introduced. The clinic also receives a daily stipend for being available for call. This varies depending on weekend or weekday, day or night shift. For weekdays 24 hours is approximately 550 and for weekends around 800 for 24 hours.

The clinic is also involved in urgent maternity related matters for patients admitted to the Perinatal Substance Use service at St. Paul’s. This is currently very low volume. Additional training and resources can be provided for this care.

If you don’t feel you have enough maternity experience to do intrapartum care, mentoring is offered through a paid program called MC4BC. This can be integrated into your current work over the periods of months and up to years (depending on timing) or can be done more intensively over a 1–3-month period. More information can be found: https://fpscbc.ca/what-we-do/clinical-supports/maternity-care-bc

The clinic also provides the option of just providing clinic work (one day every two weeks) not intrapartum care for select people who might be interested in this.

If you are interested or have questions, please contact Dr. Jennifer Leavitt jennifer.leavitt@vch.ca

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