Reimagine Care with Dr.Sienna Bourdon : Inside Shoreline Medical’s collaborative healthcare model
REIMAGINE HEALTHCAREShow Notes
Dr. Sienna Bourdon is doing the kind of primary care work that quietly holds an entire community together.
She’s a practicing family physician at Shoreline Medical on BC’s Saanich PeninsulaBC’s Saanich Peninsula, on the traditional and unceded territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) Peoples. She’s also a medical director and a hospital medical staff president. She helps run a nonprofit clinic model that grew from five physicians to roughly 25 clinicians and an allied-health team—while still seeing patients three days a week, carving out leadership time, mentoring learners, and building systems that keep people out of the ER. And she’s doing it with a very clear north star: protect access, protect teams, and keep care rooted in what the community actually needs.
So how does she do all of this, and what can the rest of Canada learn from it?
Key Takeaways:
- Primary care scales best when it is designed around people, not ownership. - Nonprofit models can unlock capital and community support that traditional clinics cannot. - Access challenges are often operational problems with practical solutions. - Standardized workflows enable scale while protecting clinical autonomy. - Culture is the true engine of sustainable growth. - Physician wellbeing must be measured and managed intentionally. - Time-blocking and boundary-setting are leadership skills, not luxuries. - Paying for indirect care is essential to long-term sustainability. - Team-based care is critical to meeting population needs with limited supply. - AI is already a must-have for reducing administrative burden, with guardrails needed for clinical reasoning.
Standout Quotes:
“Primary care is the backbone of our healthcare system. If we don’t do it well, everything else struggles.” “Culture is the secret sauce. You can’t scale care without trust.” “When physicians live in alignment with their values, burnout becomes far less likely.” “We are one of the only essential services expected to fund our own infrastructure and that’s not sustainable.”
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To help clinics reduce administrative burden without compromising quality of care, MEDFAR created Scribe AI, fully integrated with MYLE EMR.
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Designed for Canadian primary care clinics. Built to support clinician retention, workflow efficiency, and sustainable access to care.
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