Former federal Liberal health minister Jane Philpott has been appointed by the Ontario government to ensure every resident in the province is connected with a primary care provider in the next five years.
Philpott will lead a new primary care action team within the Ministry of Health with the goal of finding every person in Ontario a family doctor or nurse practitioner working in a publicly funded team before 2030.
Minister of Health Sylvia Jones touted Philpott’s “considerable experience” in a release, saying the dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queen’s University and director of its School of Medicine, is the ideal candidate to tackle the issue.
Philpott’s role as chair of the primary care action team begins Dec. 1. The government said 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 plan will include enhanced weekend and after-hours service and strengthening links to specialists and digital tools.
“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,” Philpott said in the press release.
“Our goal will be for 100 percent of Ontarians to be attached to a family doctor or nurse practitioner working in a publicly funded team, where they receive ongoing, comprehensive care and people can access that care in a timely way.”
Another goal of the plan is to lighten the administrative burden on family doctors and other primary care professionals, the government said. It is a move doctors have been calling for for some time, according to the Ontario College of Physicians. The organization said family doctors in the province spend an average of up to 19 hours a week on paperwork.
The province has added more than 12,500 new physicians to Ontario’s workforce, including a 10 percent increase in family doctors, since 2018, the government said.
It has also opened a new medical school and expanded medical school seating to add more than 260 undergraduate and 449 residency spots. The goal is to reach more than 500 additional undergraduate spots and 742 residency positions, the government said.
York University’s new medical school in Vaughan will be the first in Canada focused on training primary care doctors.
Roughly 70 percent of the new postgraduate training seats at the university will be devoted to primary care once it opens in 2028.
Philpott was elected as MP for Markham-Stouffville in 2015 during which time she served in a number of prominent federal cabinet roles, including as Minister of Health.
She was expelled from the Liberal caucus in 2019 despite already being nominated to run as a Liberal in the next federal election. She ran as an Independent but lost her seat.
