Lack of access to comprehensive primary care is a problem across Canada, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Statistics Canada, whose most recent data is from 2023.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The Ontario government says its plan to fund new primary care clinics across the province is paying dividends, with nearly 100,000 patients on the official waiting list for a family doctor having recently found a new medical provider.
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the number of people registered on Health Care Connect has fallen by 42 per cent since the Progressive Conservative government began a concerted effort to expand access to primary care in a province where 2.5 million people did not have a family doctor as of September, 2023.
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Ms. Jones shared the latest wait-list figures in Brampton on Monday as she announced that the provincial government is launching its next call for proposals for 75 new or enlarged interprofessional health teams.
The goal is for those future teams to provide 500,000 more Ontarians a base for regular primary care.
“This brings us another step closer to connecting everyone in Ontario to a primary care clinician by 2029,” Ms. Jones said at an event hosted by the North Peel Family Health Team.
Lack of access to comprehensive primary care is a problem across Canada, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information and Statistics Canada, whose most recent data is from 2023. That year, 17 per cent of Canadian adults – the equivalent of 5.4 million people – said they didn’t have access to a regular health care provider.
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced Monday that the provincial government is launching its next call for proposals for dozens of new or enlarged interprofessional health teams.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
Ontario, where 12 per cent of survey respondents said they didn’t have a family doctor or nurse practitioner, fared better than any other Canadian jurisdiction.
But other sources, including the Ontario College of Family Physicians, say those survey findings underestimate the difficulty of finding a doctor in Canada’s most populous province.
Ms. Jones was joined on Monday by Jane Philpott, the former federal health minister and medical doctor who is spearheading the province’s efforts to revive primary care.
Dr. Philpott is a proponent of reforming primary care so that it works more like the public school system, with patients enrolled in local health homes based on where they live.
Dr. Jane Philpott has been spearheading Ontario’s efforts to revive primary care.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Health homes or primary care teams – as the Ontario government calls them – usually feature a mix of physicians, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, social workers and other health providers, a model that reduces the burden on physicians alone.
The Ontario government announced in June that, after an earlier call for proposals, it was spending $235-million on more than 130 new and expanded primary care teams, with an eye to attaching 300,000 new patients to regular care.
“These teams are the front door to our health system,” Dr. Philpott said. “They are led by family doctors or nurse practitioners, and they provide timely, comprehensive care that makes a real difference.”
Ms. Jones announced the new callout less than a week after an arbitrator settled the outstanding terms of a four-year agreement between the Ford government and the Ontario Medical Association, which represents doctors across the province.
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Ontario Physicians will receive a 7.3 per cent bump in fees over the next three years, on top of a 10 per cent increase in the first year of the deal.
The agreement also modernized a popular payment model for family doctors.
The changes, including compensating family doctors for behind-the-scenes work such as charting and reviewing test results, are designed to persuade more doctors to practice office-based, cradle-to-gave primary care.
Family physicians have long pointed to a heavy administrative burden as one disincentive to working full-time in a traditional primary-care practice.