New UBC student-led clinic to pilot a new kind of primary care

What if instead of having just a family doctor as your primary healthcare provider, you could have a whole team?That’s the idea behind the University of British Columbia’s Gateway Clinic, opening in early 2026. According to Teri Charrois, the University’s associate dean of practice innovations who covers all the ways that practitioners and the province collaborate with UBC, this new clinic will combine students from different healthcare discplines across campus and have them working together. Dubbed the Gateway Clinic because of the building it's housed in, the clinic will include nursing, medicine, pharmacy, social work, rehab, physiotherapist, occupational therapist and kinesiology students who will provide care to the UBC community, with licensed practitioners overseeing them. “It’s about providing true team-based care in a clinical environment,” explains Charrois. “We talk a lot about interprofessional education, but now we’re actually embedding them in an environment where that is the norm.” For students, the goal is to teach them how to work collaboratively with other practitioners and giving them hands-on experience in a primary care setting. For the UBC community at large, the clinic will become a major health hub for the campus, which Charrois says is isolated from the rest of Vancouver—in many ways, it’s like a small town, making it the perfect place to run a pilot like this. “Some people who live and work within that community never really leave that area, so we’ll be providing patient care to that community.” The Gateway Clinic isn’t just a way to model collaborative care for students and give them practicum experience—it’s also a way to test different types of practice within B.C. Right now, in the province, you’re attached to a physician or nurse practitioner. “We’re trying to see a model where you’re attached to a clinic,” says Charrois. Funded by the province’s Ministry of Health, Charrois and her team want to figure out how else you can access primary healthcare needs when all the possible professionals are available to you and in one place. The clinic “will allow us to model and expand primary care in the province and really investigate some of those best practices to develop a scalable model across the province.”

New UBC student-led clinic to pilot a new kind of primary care

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