Ontario Connecting Over 300,000 People to Primary Care

Just one year after this provincial government launched the Your Health Plan, we’re making steady progress to connect more people to convenient care and continue to work to ensure everyone that wants a primary care provider can connect to one.

While Ontario leads the country with 90 per cent of people connecting to a regular health care provider, we know we can do better.

A record investment of $110 million will create 78 new and expanded interprofessional primary care teams and add over 400 new primary care providers to help close the gap in accessing primary care, connecting up to 328,000 more Ontarians to an interprofessional primary care team.

The new and expanded teams will include Family Health Teams, Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics, Community Health Centres and Indigenous Primary Health Care Organizations.

While the previous government cut residency school spots and limited the number of physicians practicing in interdisciplinary teams, our government had added 10,400 physicians since 2018 and invests nearly $1 billion into interdisciplinary primary care teams annually.

In addition to these historic investments to expand medical school spots and efforts to break down barriers so highly-skilled internationally trained doctors can care for people in Ontario, Ministry of Health modelling shows that these initiatives will help connect up to 98% of Ontarians to primary care in the coming years.