Lake Cowichan residents provide feedback on the future of their health care during a July community meeting.

image credit: Tyson Jones/file

Cowichan Lake is about to get a whole lot healthier.

Island Health confirmed last week that the roughly 6,500 residents of Lake Cowichan and surrounding area are just a few weeks away from their promised primary health care team.

Enhanced primary health services through a primary health care team will begin providing programs and services in early 2014, the provincial health authority (formerly VIHA) announced in a press release.

The team will be located at the Kaatza Health Centre, 58 Cowichan Ave. West and will begin delivering services early in the new year.

A nurse practitioner has also been hired for the Cowichan Lake area. The nurse practitioner will begin practising at the Brookside Medical Clinic in the New Year.

This year we went from three doctors to zero, and in the New Year well have two full time doctors and however many doctors work out of the walk-in clinic and then the nurse practioner, Lake Cowichan Mayor Ross Forrest said.

The two new docs will have an international background, said the mayor.

Were also getting the two doctors through a return of service program, where international doctors do a course through (Vancouvers) St. Pauls Hospital and two year course at the U of Victoria that allows them to practise in Canada, he said.

See the original post:

Health care team expected to start soon