The Trillium<\/a>, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen\u2019s Park.<\/p>\nFrom training new doctors to connecting them with patients, the Ontario government\u2019s lack of planning has cost the province badly needed primary care resources, the auditor general reports.<\/p>\n
For instance, despite the Ford government\u2019s push to graduate more family doctors, it has not adequately planned for the development of training sites, auditor Shelley Spence wrote in her 2025 annual report.<\/p>\n
Because of the lack of these sites, medical schools will have created 44 per cent fewer family medicine seats by the end of this academic year than the Ministry of Health (MOH) had originally planned, Spence found.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOur audit concluded that MOH and MCURES (Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security) did not consistently have processes in place to plan for medical school seat expansion for family medicine or to assess its progress,\u201d the report stated.<\/p>\n
In an effort to boost the health-care workforce and access to primary care, the government has announced plans since 2022 to add 340 undergraduate seats and 551 postgraduate seats at six pre-existing medical schools and two new ones by the 2028-29 academic year, with about 60 per cent of the new seats expected for family medicine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spence said the two ministries didn\u2019t show that their decision to increase the number of medical school seats was \u201cbased on comprehensive analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThese considerations include justification for the most appropriate number of seats to add, the proportion of seats allocated to family medicine, and evaluation of the medical schools\u2019 capacity to implement the expansion,\u201d her report stated.<\/p>\n
She wrote that the government didn\u2019t \u201cfully assess\u201d the need to open new medical schools and \u201cdid not consider the option to expand the capacity of the existing medical schools to accommodate new students,\u201d such as through satellite campuses.<\/p>\n
She also said the Health Ministry \u201cdid not, in a timely manner, plan for the development of additional family physician training sites, which are essential in the successful delivery of postgraduate medical programs.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Spence\u2019s report, medical schools warned the Health Ministry in November 2023 that there was \u201ccurrently a limit on the amount of family medicine training that can occur, with current sites and preceptors already at full capacity\u201d and asked for funding for more training sites.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until a few years later, in 2025, that the ministry started \u201cpreparing a framework to assess\u201d how many primary care teaching clinics (PCTCs) were needed and where, the auditor general\u2019s report stated.<\/p>\n
This was followed by an announcement this past May of up to $300 million for the expansion of 17 PCTCs in areas with little primary care access.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There weren\u2019t enough training sites available to keep expanding seats by the 2025-26 academic year, so medical schools will have rolled out 89 fewer seats than planned this year.<\/p>\n
Spence recommended that the two ministries develop a framework for deciding on medical seat expansions going forward and work with medical schools to monitor and ensure the 17 new and expanded PCTCs are ready for 2028-29.<\/p>\n
She also called on the Health Ministry to \u201cevaluate the reliability of source data and assumptions\u201d it uses in its family physicians supply and demand forecast model, noting that the government \u201cused a potentially low estimate of the number of Ontarians who need a family physician but do not have one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the lack of training sites, PC MPP Anthony Leardi, parliamentary assistant to Health Minister Sylvia Jones, said the government has boosted the number of people being trained in the province.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just like any other profession \u2014 when you’re training people to enter that profession, you need the number of people who are qualified, not only qualified in that profession, but also to actually train others in that profession,\u201d he said, adding that the government is going to \u201ctry to hit our very high goal.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The auditor also found that Health Care Connect (HCC), the province\u2019s centralized tool for connecting patients to primary care, is not serving its purpose well.<\/p>\n
Over the past three years, an average of only seven per cent of physicians who could accept Health Care Connect patients were doing so, the auditor found.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As of Jan. 1, about 235,000 Ontarians were registered with HCC \u2014 only about 11 per cent of the two million Ontarians without a family doctor.<\/p>\n
\u201cA group of 12 Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) informed the ministry in December 2024 that they \u2018do not support updating the existing legacy HCC tool as it is no longer fit for purpose,\u2019\u201d Spence wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The \u201coutdated system\u201d was \u201cnot widely supported\u201d by doctors or used by Ontarians and \u201crequired redesign,\u201d the OHTs said.<\/p>\n
While 47 per cent of registrants between 2020\u20132025 waited fewer than 21 days to be connected to a physician, 15 per cent waited over 260 days, the auditor found. More than 108,000 of the 178,000 patients still waiting to be referred had been waiting for longer than a year, as of June.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spence said during a press conference that her office recommended the government expand the number of languages on the HCC website beyond just English and French.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving only about 11 per cent of the people that need a family doctor even knowing about Health Care Connect, there needs to be more education and more widespread information about how to register on Health Care Connect,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey should promote it. They should decide, is this going to be the system, or do we need a new system and get it up and running so that people can get better matched to doctors quicker.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about this, Leardi wouldn\u2019t say, just telling reporters that Health Care Connect is \u201conly one tool to get yourself connected to primary care, there are a lot of people who don’t use Health Care Connect, who are getting connected to family physicians and nurse practitioners every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a lack of family doctors \u2014 and a lack of a centralized recruitment body \u2014 is resulting in intra-Ontario competition, Spence added in her report.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Every province and territory in Canada, except Ontario, has a centralized physician recruitment model, Spence wrote, citing research from the Ontario Physician Recruitment Alliance.<\/p>\n
A survey earlier this year from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario found that municipalities covering about 89 per cent of Ontario\u2019s population are collectively spending more than $6.3 million per year on doctor recruitment and incentives, the auditor noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lack of a provincial entity that is responsible for co-ordinating physician recruitment in the province has resulted in a fragmented and competitive approach to recruitment\u201d between provincial and municipal bodies, Spence wrote.<\/p>\n
Funding issues are also preventing adequate training, the auditor found. Ontario invited 40 health teams in high-needs areas to submit health-care proposals to be funded. The auditor looked at a quarter of the 75 proposals submitted and found that they received just 36 per cent of their requested amounts, \u201cwith one proposal receiving as low as 10%.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because the Ministry of Health didn\u2019t request applications for scalable projects, some teams had to spend time figuring out what they could do with the lower amounts.<\/p>\n
For example, one Indigenous organization had a letter of commitment from an Indigenous family doctor to practise in their home community \u2014 but it was given only 14 per cent of its requested funding, for a nurse practitioner. The doctor signed elsewhere, Spence wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow is it in the primary care crisis that we face right now that the average approval of a funding request is only 36 per cent of what those key primary care teams are asking for, and in some cases, the approval is as low as just 10 per cent of what they’re asking,\u201d said Liberal primary care critic Adil Shamji.<\/p>\n
He pointed to Health Care Connect, saying it\u2019s failing to meet the moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cOntario Health Teams are saying it’s not working, patients are not using it, family doctors are not using it,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBehind all of the announcements this government isn’t delivering the infrastructure, the funding, the evaluation or the co-ordination to deliver primary care for Ontarians,\u201d Shamji said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
NDP Leader Marit Stiles said the same: it makes sense doctors aren\u2019t using Health Care Connect with so few people needing a family doctor registered for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPretty much everything that we have laid out here that’s part of this so-called Primary Care Action Plan is a failure, it’s just fluff, it’s announcements,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2014With files from Jessica Smith Cross and Katherine DeClerq<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s note: This article was updated after it was initially published to include comments from the auditor general, opposition parties and the government.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Training spots limited, patient-doctor connection tool outdated, recruitment fragmented, Shelley Spence finds EDITOR\u2019S NOTE: This article originally appeared…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-336677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}