Ensuring that community-based physicians and their teams have safe, healthy workplaces is vital to improving their psychological and physical health and safety, strengthening violence and injury prevention efforts, and increasing their capacity to do their most important work: caring for patients.
One important tool to support this work is the provincewide Community Physician Health and Safety Program (CPHS), created in partnership between Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health, and managed by SWITCH BC. The program offers tools, support, training, and free health and safety assessments, customized to your team’s needs.
To better serve community-based specialists, family physicians, and their teams, the CPHS Build Your Program website has been revamped to improve the user experience and make it easier to access resources for creating a custom health and safety program. Informed by physician feedback, the program covers high-priority topics such as violence prevention and emergency preparedness.
Build Your Program website: Updates informed by physicians
The updated, mobile-friendly website features improved search functionality and more ready-to-use templates, checklists, videos, and step-by-step guidance to help clinics build a workplace health and safety program that works for their team and to ensure compliance with important provincial health and safety regulations. Whether physicians work in a large urban clinic or support their patients in a smaller rural setting, they can create a valuable resource that provides peace of mind and empowerment for themselves and their teams—at their own pace. The refreshed website also features a simplified user journey to obtain a Certificate of Completion.
Community Physician Health and Safety: Supporting doctors and their teams
The website upgrade is just one part of CPHS’s expansion, enabled by renewed funding from Doctors of BC and the Ministry of Health through the Physician Main Agreement (PMA). This investment will help more community-based specialists, family physicians, and clinic staff create safer, healthier workplaces. The funding will expand free, confidential support, including in-person clinic assessments delivered by Community Physician Health and Safety Advisors across BC.
Since July 2023, the CPHS program has supported 820 physicians and 1,059 medical team members across BC, and SWITCH BC’s Community Physician Health and Safety Advisors have completed 125 free clinic assessments. Read about physicians working in the community who participated in an assessment and shared about the support they received.
Check out the revamped CPHS Build Your Program website to start your journey. If you are a community-based family physician or specialist who would like to schedule a free Clinic Health and Safety Assessment, book an initial phone or virtual meeting with the CPHS program team. Access more information and resources on Doctors of BC’s Workplace Safety webpage.
