ArticlePrimary health care research & development2023
Access to episodic primary care: a cross-sectional comparison of walk-in clinics and urgent primary care centers in British Columbia.
Article in Primary health care research & development, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Learning Cycle method: an approach to rapidly bring evidence to the point of decision-making for health system planning.Health research policy and systems · 2026Article
- Urgent care centres for reducing the demand on emergency departments: a scoping review of published quantitative and qualitative studies.The Medical journal of Australia · 2025Article
- Experiences and preferences of people without access to primary care: Results from a national cross-sectional survey in Canada.Canadian family physician Medecin de famille canadienArticle
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
aimThis study aimed to identify publicly reported access characteristics for episodic primary care in BC and provided a clinic-level comparison between walk-in clinics and UPCCs.
backgroundWalk-in clinics are non-hospital-based primary care facilities that are designed to operate without appointments and provide increased healthcare access with extended hours. Urgent and Primary Care Centres (UPCCs) were introduced to British Columbia (BC) in 2018 as an additional primary care resource that provided urgent, but not emergent care during extended hours.
methodsThis cross-sectional study used publicly available data from all walk-in clinics and UPCCs in BC. A structured data collection form was used to record access characteristics from clinic websites, including business hours, weekend availability, attachment to a longitudinal family practice, and provision of virtual services.
findingsIn total, 268 clinics were included in the analysis (243 walk-in clinics, 25 UPCCs). Of those, 225 walk-in clinics (92.6%) and two UPCCs (8.0%) were attached to a longitudinal family practice. Only 153 (63%) walk-in clinics offered weekend services, compared to 24 (96%) of UPCCs. Walk-in clinics offered the majority (8,968.6/ 78.4%) of their service hours between 08:00 and 17:00, Monday to Friday. UPCCs offered the majority (889.3/ 53.7%) of their service hours after 17:00.
conclusionMost walk-in clinics were associated with a longitudinal family practice and provided the majority of clinic services during typical business hours. More research that includes patient characteristics and care outcomes, analyzed at the clinic level, may be useful to support the optimization of episodic primary healthcare delivery.
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