Community partnership

A new community maternity clinic has opened in Chilliwack, providing timely pre- to postnatal care for women in Chilliwack, Hope and Agassiz, in direct response to a looming maternity care crisis in British Columbia.

The new clinic, located inside Chilliwack General Hospital, is a multi-stakeholder community partnership led by the Chilliwack Obstetrical Group, and supported by the Chilliwack Division of Family Practice, Chilliwack Hospital Foundation, Fraser Valley Health Care Foundation, and Fraser Health.

It’s the realization of a decade-long vision shared by local physicians to centralize maternity care into a single, multidisciplinary centre within the hospital setting, according to Dr. Alison Henry, physician co-lead for the maternity care clinic program.

“People should have care where they live,” said Henry. “The vision is to have a central hub where patients could come for centralized maternity care.”

Named Ehó:temáwtxw (eh-HO-tuh-MOW-twkh), which means “a home to wrap someone in care,” the clinic is currently staffed by four family physicians, two registered midwives, and three registered nurses.

The goal is to increase the number of family physicians and other health-care providers working in the clinic and enable a more sustainable operation and round-the-clock care for pregnant women.

For Henry, sustaining this clinic matters because maternity service is often a family’s first entry point into the local health-care system, and can significantly impact the entire family’s care trajectory.

“Growing a family is a vital part of our community, and I really see this as something that the community needs to support,” Henry said, “because this is the first step in what makes a family become a family.”

The integrated, team-based care model of the new maternity clinic can be an attractive proposition for younger doctors, she added.

“From my personal conversations and from national-level studies and surveys of younger-generation doctors, we know that they’re looking for an integrated care approach…  And part of the design of the clinic was building a place that would be attractive to recruit newer physicians and midwives,” Henry explained.

Averting a crisis

The initiative is launched amid a steadily declining number of maternity care providers in the region, a trend increasingly seen across the province. In March, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of B.C. issued a warning about a maternity crisis in B.C. following a series of maternity diversions at hospitals in the Lower Mainland, due to a shortage of OB-GYNs.

These diversions came on the heels of a mass resignation in October 2025 by a group of OB-GYNS in Kamloops, B.C., citing extreme physician burnout.

A similar trajectory is becoming evident in Chilliwack, said Henry.

“Around 2015, there were roughly 22 family doctors doing primary care obstetrics in Chilliwack, Hope and Agassiz. And as of June this year, we will only have four family doctors doing primary care obstetrics,” she said.

In the same period, Chilliwack’s population significantly grew from about 86,000 in 2015 to more than 112,000 in 2025. Many of these residents are of childbearing age, Henry added.

“With the dwindling maternity provider numbers, we had to do something otherwise maternity care would not be available in Chilliwack.”

Big win for efficiency, sustainability

For physician co-lead Dr. Braeden Beaumont, the maternity clinic offers a sustainable solution to the widening gap between the increasing number of maternity patients and the decreasing pool of primary care providers doing prenatal and delivery care.

“There’s a lot of new families moving to Chilliwack, and personally, a lot of the patients I’ve met recently are all starting a family with their first child,” said Beaumont. “So having a program like this maternity clinic to take care of them all is going to be huge for the community.”

Henry and Beaumont are part of the Chilliwack Obstetrical Group, a group of family doctors and registered midwives providing prenatal, delivery and postnatal services to women in Chilliwack and Hope.

Beaumont said the clinic’s team-based model will facilitate a more efficient and timely care for maternity patients.

 

“Because we are now going to be in a more centralized system, where we’re all working together in the same place, this will also increase our efficiency quite a bit,” he explained.

“Being in the hospital, we are able to oversee the clinic and see patients there but also be close at hand for when the maternity ward calls us for delivery or assessment upstairs.”

The clinic’s multidisciplinary approach would make it easier for new physicians and other allied health providers to join the practice, expanding the clinic’s services. Increasing the number of providers would mean shorter shifts and better work-life balance for physicians, noted Henry.

Beyond numbers, Henry also hopes to expand the scope of the clinic’s services to include prenatal education for women, lactation and gestational diabetes supports, and after-hours appointments to accommodate working mothers.

“This clinic is a true collaboration. The Chilliwack Division has been really helpful in supporting this work, recognizing just how important this clinic is not just to our community but also to family doctors,” she said.