Ontario expands push to get more residents a family doctor
The Flemingdon Health Centre on Toronto's east side is one of 130 primary care clinics across the province sharing $235 million in funding to link 300,000 more people to family physicians in the latest bid to ease
Ontario's doctor shortage.
'While it won't happen overnight, teams will begin accepting patients in the coming weeks and months,'
Dr. Jane Philpott
, who is spearheading efforts by Premier Doug Ford's government to boost access to primary care, said Monday at the centre with Health Minister Sylvia Jones.
The centre will get more than $4 million, which Jones said is expected to help another 9,600 area residents into primary care as the province works toward its goal of getting a family physician or nurse practitioner for two million Ontarians who don't have one by 2029 under a $2.1 billion plan.
'We can reduce pressure on hospitals and emergency departments, allowing them to focus their resources on where they are most needed,' said Mireille Chung, Flemingdon's director of community health.
The Health Ministry will issue another call for proposals from new or expanding primary health care teams in the fall.
Jones announced the plan on the eve of Ontario's Feb. 27 election campaign
to address a political vulnerability with the government under fire for a worsening doctor shortage, acknowledging people have been waiting 'too long' to get a doctor as the province's population has increased.
About 8,600 physicians have retired or left their practices since 2018, according to statistics from the Ontario Medical Association.
Opposition parties have questioned whether the Progressive Conservative government's efforts will go far enough, given that the medical association says there are already 2.5 million people without a family doctor in Ontario, a number that is expected to rise to 4.4 million.
Jones has disputed those numbers, saying the government's figures on people without family doctors comes from organizations including the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
As a longer-term measure to make sure there are enough doctors, the government is opening new medical schools, but they will not graduate physicians for several years.
Philpott is a former federal Liberal health minister who went on to become the director of the Queen's University medical school in Kingston. She began her work for the province Dec. 1, using a system to link people to doctors by postal code, in similar fashion to the way children are directed to schools.
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