A new clinic opening early next year on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island has a different structure it hopes will help attract and retain family doctors amid an ongoing physician shortage.

The Colwood Medical Clinic will be run not as a private practice, as is normally the case, but by the Greater Victoria municipality itself. The mayor says they have now hired their first doctor and plan on bringing on seven more.

All eight will be paid as municipal employees, receiving full medical benefits, vacation and a pension. They will also be free of the administrative and financial tasks doctors typically handle when running their own clinics, instead handing that work off to the city.