Former federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott will head a new team with a mandate to connect every person in Ontario to a primary care provider within the next five years, the province announced Monday.
As of this summer, there were more than 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, according to the Ontario Medical Association.
Philpott, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen’s University and director of its School of Medicine, said in a statement that she wants to see 100 per cent of Ontarians attached to a family doctor or nurse practitioner working in a publicly funded team.
“Ontario can build a health system where the guarantee of access to a primary care team is as automatic as the assurance that every child will be assigned to a public school in their neighbourhood,” she said.
Philpott’s new role as chair of a new primary care action team in the Ministry of Health starts Dec. 1 and the government says she will draw on an interprofessional model of primary care that she designed with colleagues in the Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team.
The government says the plan will include ensuring better service on weekends and after-hours, reducing administrative burden on family doctors and other primary care professionals and improving connections to specialists and digital tools.