A newly-leaked internal Ministry of Health report appears to show more than 200 communities across Ontario do not have family doctors who are taking on new patients, a fact Ford government critics have jumped upon.
The internal report, leaked to the Ontario Liberals on Wednesday and published by the party, shows 205 Ontario communities don’t have family doctors taking on new patients, and also reveals more than 2,000 physicians are likely to retire over the next five years.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said the new figures suggest the province’s family doctor shortage is worse than the Ford government has been willing to admit.
“It says the situation is far worse and getting worse each and every day,” Crombie told reporters. “This is something that we should have been planning for for six years now… they don’t have a plan to take care of it.”
Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones said plans were already in place to increase access to primary care and family doctors, even if there is a surge in retirements.
“That is exactly why we have made the investments that we are,” she told reporters. “Expanding access to medical schools, expanding the number of seats, expanding the number of medical schools in Ontario.”
The report also lists a range of municipalities where family doctors are not taking on new patients, with many located in parts of rural and northern Ontario. It reveals that just under half of the communities in the province, but not necessarily half the population, don’t have access to a new family doctor.
“It’s like the Hunger Games out there, in communities all across Ontario, who are trying to fight over attracting family physicians,” Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said.
“You can’t attract a family physician to a community when you don’t have adequate housing and schools and infrastructure for those folks. So this is a government that is failing on so many fronts.”
The data doesn’t necessarily mean the 205 communities don’t have access to any kind of primary care, but rather that family doctors are not taking on new patients. Nurse practitioners or walk-in clinics could be available where family doctors are not.
Jones admitted the province is struggling to get doctors into parts of Ontario but said a plan was in place to ultimately fix the problem.
“There is always an additional challenge when you’re recruiting individuals in more rural and remote communities,” she said.
“But those are the programs that we have in place to ensure that as individuals practice and choose to practice in northern Ontario, they have additional funding. Because we understand that it becomes more challenging in northern communities and remote and rural communities.”
Ontario Liberal health critic Adil Shamji, however, said the government needs to ensure that people training as family doctors go on to work in the profession.
“We also need to improve the circumstances that family doctors are working in so that when they graduate, they don’t go off to practice anesthesia or emergency medicine or sports medicine,” he said.
“And then we need to make sure that those doctors are incentivized and supported not just to work in Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton, but to work in these 205 municipalities in counties that don’t have a single doctor that’s rostering patients.”
Jones said that, along with plans to train more doctors, a move to other forms of primary care and health teams would help close the gap geographically and if more doctors retire. The primary care team model, the minister said, can be better than a family doctor in the long run.
“Frankly, it is what clinicians and patients want,” Jones said.
“They don’t just want a phone number (and someone to say), ‘Go somewhere else to learn about your diagnosis of diabetes.’ They want to sit down and have those deeper conversations with a dietitian, with nurse practitioners, with an RN so that they can understand what that diagnosis is and what the impacts are for their families.”