Canada_ (Commonwealth) _ According to new data, the number of Toronto residents without a primary care physician surpassed 400,000 in March of last year. According to study released Wednesday by INSPIRE Primary Health Care, a primary health care research initiative run by experts from Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, at least 72,000 individuals in Toronto lost their family doctor between March 2020 and March 2022. This puts the overall number of individuals without access to a family doctor in the city to at least 415,000.
Dr. Jobin Varughese, a family doctor in Brampton and the president-elect of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, believes the problem is worse in some areas of town. According to the analysis, the number of persons without a family doctor in Ontario was at least 2.2 million in March 2022, up from 1.8 million in 2020. According to the college, the findings are likely an underestimate of the genuine rates because data for patients born in or migrated to the city after 2019 is unavailable.
The college is urging the province to employ more members of the health-care team who can assist family doctors and free up time for patients. It is also calling for upgrades to “outdated” digital systems that would reduce the administrative strain on family doctors. According to Varughese, doctors can spend up to 19 hours each week negotiating red tape or completing administrative chores such as referrals.
Varughese noted some people who migrated out of the city during the outbreak and maintained their family doctors as an example. The physicians had to find experts for their patients in their new locations, which was a time-consuming effort. “Our province also leads the country in terms of having 90% of Ontarians have a family doctor or main health-care provider,” Hannah Jensen, a spokesman for Health Minister Sylvia Jones, said in a statement.
Jensen also stated that the province has begun the greatest expansion of medical schools in Ontario in more than a decade. The province increased 100 medical school spaces and 154 spots for medical school graduates to train as residents in the 2023 budget.
