Ontario pledges $1.8-billion to get more residents access to family doctors or nurse practitioners
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones listens to questions from reporters following a press conference in Etobicoke, Ont., Jan. 11, 2023.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
The Ontario government is promising to spend $1.8-billion to ensure every patient has a family doctor or nurse practitioner as Premier Doug Ford prepares to send voters to the polls early with a snap election call expected Wednesday.
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones and former federal health minister Jane Philpott, who leads the province’s primary-care action team, unveiled a plan on Monday that highlighted $400-million in previously announced primary-care funding and $1.4-billion in new money to be doled out over four years.
The goal of the plan is to attach an additional two million Ontarians to interdisciplinary health teams that include family doctors working alongside other health professionals such as nurses, pharmacists, dieticians and social workers.
Monday’s announcement was designed to address the public’s concerns about the primary-care crisis, which remains a major sore point for the governing Progressive Conservatives. The number of Ontarians without a family doctor rose to 2.5 million as of September, 2023, up from 1.8 million in 2020, according to data based on Ontario Health Insurance Plan billing records and distributed by the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
The severity of the ongoing problem was on full display earlier this month when hundreds of people lined up in the early morning snow outside a legion hall in Walkerton, a town in Bruce County, northwest of Toronto, to sign up with a new family doctor.
Despite the depth of the crisis, Ontario performs better than any other province when it comes to the share of residents with a regular health-care provider, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which draws its data from Statistics Canada surveys.
But, like other jurisdictions across the country, Ontario faces an uphill battle against the prevailing trends. Older doctors with large practices are retiring, fewer young doctors are choosing to train as family physicians and fewer of those are willing to work full-time in traditional office-based, cradle-to-grave family practice.
Ms. Jones and Dr. Philpott, who was started her new role Dec. 1, promised to alleviate some of those pressures with their new plan. Highlights include a promise to create and expand 305 additional primary-care teams to attach approximately two million people to primary care over the next four years.
The plan also features a vow to introduce legislation that would set standards for what patients can expect from primary-care services, as well as commitments to publicly report on key performance metrics, such as the number of people attached to primary care teams and the percentage who can snag same-day or next-day appointments.
Dr. Philpott and Ms. Jones also promised to set a target of 12 months for patients to get a primary-care provider through Health Care Connect, the province’s central waiting list.
Ontarians are expected to head to the polls on Feb. 27, more than a year before the next regularly scheduled election. Mr. Ford, whose party is well ahead in the polls, has said he needs a renewed mandate to take on the threat of sweeping tariffs from United States President Donald Trump.