By Shelley Gurvey

In our effort to increase health care access for our community of patients, the Co-op Community Health Centre @James Bay (CCHC) at 547 Michigan St is pleased to announce that we will be offering rapid access appointment times each day in our schedule.  In addition to regular scheduled appointment times for follow ups, physicals, chronic disease management, etc, our rapid access times serve to provide you, our patients, with better access for episodic and urgent care. Issues such as colds/viruses, injuries, headaches, rashes, chest pain, or refills of your medications can be seen by any of our practitioners during a rapid access appointment time.  During these shorter visits, please focus on the single issue which led you to make your appointment. If there are other health concerns you will be asked to make another appointment with your physician or with one of our other practitioners.

The purpose of the rapid access visits is to provide urgent and episodic care to our patients in a timely way.  By having limited blocks of rapid access times in our practitioners' schedules, we are able to see most patients within 24 hours for urgent health issues. This allows more space in the schedules for ongoing care of chronic physical and mental health issues. While you will still be followed by your own physician, you are a patient of the entire health centre. Our rapid access model serves to balance quality continuity of care with good access to the care you need when you need it.  By utilizing the rapid access scheduling, we hope to be able to accept more patients to our practice.  We ask that you please utilize this important service.

Patients of Cheryl Hobson and Former James Bay Clinic Drs McKinney and Ehasoo

As many of you are aware, our nurse practitioner, Cheryl Hobson, recently left our Co-op Community Health Centre in order to further her career.  A letter was sent out to her patients describing the change and promising that we would provide more information on our ability to continue to provide on-going care for them at the health center.  Thanks to our recruitment of new practitioners and our shift towards rapid access visits in addition to our scheduled visits, we are pleased to announce that we will be happy to provide ongoing primary care to former patients of Cheryl Hobson.  If you are such a patient we would encourage you to contact the CCHC at 250-388-6811 at your convenience if you require on going care or have a particular health concern.

Our Health CO-OP

The 324 members of the Victoria Community Health Co-operative own and manage the Co-op Community Health Center @ James Bay (CCHC) . We are the first health co-op in Victoria and the only integrative medicine health co-op in BC. We would like to invite all of our patients and the wider community to learn more about our co-op and to consider getting involved in this unique community owned, publicly funded integrative primary health care initiative.  Our co-op is involved in outreach education activities, by-donation community wellness clinics (offering Complementary and Alternative Medicine modalities)  as well as our CCHC @JB. We need community members to get involved in order to grow our programming and services. Consider learning more about our co-op and becoming a member today!  For more information, please contact Shelley Gurvey at the CCHC or go to to find out more.