The Pender Harbour Health Centre (PHHC) is located in the rural and remote community of Madeira Park in Pender Harbour on the beautiful Sunshine Coast. Pender Harbour is known for its natural beauty with numerous lakes and hiking trails alongside many kms of beautiful, rugged coastline. If you love being surrounded by nature, then don’t miss the opportunity to visit Pender Harbour and the Sunshine Coast. You can access Pender Harbour from the Lower Mainland of Vancouver by catching a ferry from Horseshoe Bay and driving roughly an hour north on the Sunshine Coast Highway passing through the coastal towns of Gibsons and Sechelt. Pender Harbour is identified as a rural and remote community given, we have no access to public transportation or affordable transportation options and most services such as the Sechelt/shishalh Hospital and many retail stores are located over 30km away.
The Pender Harbour Health Centre is the Sunshine Coast’s only Community Health Centre (CHC) and we have been providing access to health and wellness services and programs to residents of Pender Harbour and the surrounding rural and remote communities for 48 years. The PHHC is a community led non-profit organization which formed when the previous hospital was relocated from Pender Harbour to Sechelt, over 30kms away. The Pender Harbour Health Centre Society is governed by a Board of Directors and is given our mandate by the communities and residents we serve. Our mission is to provide quality, caring and responsive health services for the Pender Harbour Community.
Our vision is to be a leader in community health services on the Sunshine Coast and in British Columbia and our core values include responding to and strengthening community, integration and collaboration across the health care continuum, providing care in an honest way with integrity and ethical standards. We aim to foster an integrated team-based care approach and provide an environment for staff and patients that are supportive, respectful and responsive. We pride ourselves on our openness in communication and our innovation and creativity. This vision and these core values drive the work of the Health Centre leadership and our multidisciplinary team every day.
The PHHC is the only health and wellness provider in Pender Harbour and north of Sechelt and we are unique as we are in a “transportation desert”. We are the main primary healthcare provider for the 3000+ residents of Pender Harbour and surrounding communities and this number increases through tourism to 6000 in the spring and summer seasons. We offer access to primary care services such as a family physician and specialized nursing clinics, including our Chronic Disease Management, Diabetes and Youth Health Clinics. These services are supported by our allied health professionals such as a part-time social worker and dietician.
Further, we have a contract with our local health authority (Vancouver Coastal Health) to provide an Ambulatory Care Clinic and Homecare Nursing services, including palliative care support so that our community members can access these vital services in their home community without the need to travel. We also partner with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) to provide access to public health nursing services, nurse practitioner supports, adult mental health and addiction supports and psychiatry. We are proud of this partnership with VCH and appreciate the ability to provide local access to health authority programs and support for our patients. The PHHC is also one of seven patient medical homes on the Sunshine Coast that make up the Sunshine Coast Primary Care Network (PCN) and we partner with the local PCN to provide local access to pharmacist supports and adult counselling for our patients.
As a Community Health Centre we believe that we have an obligation and mandate to provide supplementary programs and supports to help address various social determinants of health. We do this through such programs as our United Way BC funded Better at Home program, seniors programming, patient transportation supports and food security programming. Through our partnership with United Way BC, we are able to support seniors in our community with various day-to-day supports, from grocery shopping and friendly visiting to light housekeeping and minor home improvements. Recently, through increased funding support from United Way BC we were proud to launch a free transportation service for seniors in our community called the Pender Harbour Seniors Link (‘Seniors Link’ free shuttle giving Area A seniors a lift – Coast Reporter). This free hop on/hop off bus services provides a transportation option for seniors in our accessible minibus, and this has been the first time in many years that seniors in our community have had access to funded transportation supports. Through this new funding, we also launched a new seniors food security program which is providing eligible seniors with nutritious meals delivered to their homes by our dedicated volunteers bi-weekly. We thank United Way BC for their continued support of the PHHC and the seniors in our community.
Finally, as a health and wellness hub for our community the PHHC is proud to partner with local health and wellness practitioners and businesses to provide access to their services from the PHHC. These health and wellness partners include Pender Harbour Dental, a full-service dental clinic, foot care nursing, chiropractors, acupuncturists and massage therapists. We appreciate and value the partnerships and support from these tenants and skilled practitioners.
The Pender Harbour Health Centre provides the above supports and programs to our community with no direct core funding from our provincial government. We rely on service agreements and funding support from our local municipality and our local Health Care Auxiliary, alongside grants and generous donations to serve our community, provide our programs and operate each year. We are always looking for new ways to partner and new opportunities for sustainable funding and we continue to advocate for core operational funding with the provincial government.
If you are interested in learning more about the PHHC or you are a family physician looking for a new community to practice we encourage you to reach out to us at admin@penderharbourhealth.com for more information you can access our website at Pender Harbour Health Centre – on the Sunshine Coast. If you are interested in learning more about the Community Health Centre model in BC we encourage you to check out the British Columbia Association of Community Health Centres (BCACHC) website at Home – BCACHC.
