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VICTORIA - A group of Victoria doctors is looking to change the way the province delivers healthcare. They are orthopaedic physicians and surgeons. And for years, their patients have criss-crossed the city.

Some waited for weeks, sometimes months, as each doctor delivered his part of the care program.

Now, they are under one roof, in a massive clinic at the Uptown Shopping Centre in Saanich.

The clinic is designed to provide one-stop care for patients, and cut the red tape in health-care waitlist, by having all of the Capital Region's 25 orthopaedic surgeons and physicians work in working under the same roof.

"Part of the obstacle was getting everybody to buy into a different way of doing care," Rebalance MD CEO Stefan Fletcher tells CTV News. "Once they saw the model, and once they saw there was an opportunity to implement it - they wanted to be a part of it."

The doctors who practice in the clinic say it allows them to collaborate more closely with each other, and other health care providers such as physiotherapists.

There are 1,000 people on Southern Vancouver Island that are waiting for orthopaedic surgery and another 1,500 waiting to see an orthopaedic surgeon. The doctors who run the clinic are hoping the model will decrease that wait time and improve the quality of care while they are waiting.

"We can draw on focused sports medicine doctors and the podiatrists to help facilitate an earlier consult for a patient that may require a surgeon, but may need a comprehensive musculoskeletal opinion," explains orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. James Stone.

The orthopaedic surgeons say it's an important step forward because 80 percent of the patients they see don't end up needing surgery.

The idea for the clinic came from the health professionals themselves; fed up with the old model of care, they decided to make the change.

And though the clinic is privately owned by the doctors and therapists, it is not private medicine.

"Everything we are doing in here is within the medical plan," says Fletcher "What we're doing is trying to make the medical plan more efficient. We are trying to look for efficiencies in the system."

And there are plans to expand, with Vancouver Island's first osteoporosis clinic and then a radiology centre in the space next door.

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