Ontario is pledging $1.8 billion to connect an additional two million people to a publicly funded family doctor or primary care team within the next four years.
The province says the funding will “close the gap” by 2029 for the remaining 10 percent of people in the province in need of primary care.
The announcement includes $1.4 billion in new funding for Ontario’s Primary Care Action Team led by former federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott and more than $400 million in already-approved financing for primary care, the province said in a Jan. 27 press release
The new funding will be used to implement a primary care system using the best existing models from across the province, Philpott said in the press release.
The goal of the initiative is to create and expand 305 additional family health teams, connecting 300,000 more people to primary care this year and 500,000 the following year, the government said. More than 600,000 are to be added annually in the subsequent two years.
Family care teams are made up of a family physician or nurse practitioner as well as nurses, physician assistants, social workers, and dieticians.
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There are currently 2.5 million people in the province without access to a family doctor and that number is expected to rise to 4.4 million in a year, according to the Ontario Medical Association (OMA).
OMA said in a release that the provincial health-care system is in “crisis,” and while the association applauded the latest funding announcement, it said more needed to be done for long-term stability.
“We have been fortunate to meet with Dr. Philpott and Health Minister Sylvia Jones already and we fully support their work and look forward to co-designing a system where every Ontarian has a family doctor. At the same time, more needs to be done to retain and attract family physicians,” OMA CEO Kimberly Moran said. “We are ready, willing, and able to use our resources to ensure this work succeeds and ensure every Ontarian is connected to family medicine.”
The existing funding structures for family medicine in Ontario are lagging behind those in other regions across the country, OMA said. Doctors in the province are asking the family practice model to be updated and funded to retain current physicians, recruit new ones, and attract others to come back to the field, OMA noted.
Under the new initiative, Ontario will continue to recruit and retain doctors and other health professionals and expand the number of community-based primary care teaching clinics, the province said.
