Advocacy
Strengthening Primary Care in Ontario
Family Physicians: Caring for Ontarians, For Life
Family physicians are the cornerstone of Ontario’s healthcare system, supporting patients through every stage of life. The government has taken positive steps to strengthen our system, and we support those efforts and the work of the Primary Care Action Team to connect every person in Ontario to primary health care within five years.
The Solutions
We can ensure every Ontarian, no matter where they live, has access to a family physician. And that every family physician can focus even more on what matters most – their patients.
Technology: Smarter, More Efficient Workflows
Investing in technology can transform how family physicians work, reducing administrative workloads, releasing more time for patient care, and improving the patient experience. For example:
- Accelerate the development of a centralized intake and referral system to get patients coordinated and faster access to specialists and diagnostic testing. Ensure the system provides access based on need and is transparent to both patients and specialists.
- Develop and implement a provincially supported digital health and AI strategy – including a dedicated primary care strategy – that builds on Ontario’s AI scribe program and incorporates other digital innovations in family practice.
Infrastructure: Building Better, Connected Care
As part of the digital health and AI strategy, co-developed with family physicians, include plans to achieve the following priorities:
- Connect EMRs that integrate across care settings, with a portable patient record accessible to all providers involved in a patient’s care.
- Strengthen the digital foundation to help cut wait times and improve access for patients in northern and rural communities, through infrastructure, connectivity, IT support, training and security.
- Create an immunization registry, ensuring every Ontarian and immunization provider has real-time access to vaccination records that are integrated into EMRs and a patient portal.
Workforce: Making Family Medicine a More Attractive Option
Investing in Ontario’s primary care workforce is an essential part of attracting and retaining the skilled professionals that are the foundation of patient care.
- Support family practices with their digital infrastructure to manage increasingly complex and costly digital technologies that are used to support patient care.
- To help attract and retain allied healthcare professionals in primary care teams, address the wage gap with other publicly funded health settings to build the capacity of family physicians and ensure patients can access the care they need.
- Partner on Change Management: Invest $500,000 per year for three years to leverage the OCFP’s Community of Practice, Leadership Academy, and Family Physician-Administrative Leadership Partnership to help advance the work of PCAT and facilitate change with family physicians.
Teams: Meeting the Needs of Patients and Family Physicians
Done right, team-based care can increase family physician capacity to help reach the government’s goal of attaching more patients.
- Optimize collaboration within teams: Accelerate the FHT contract review process by 2026/27, enabling better integration of resources in family physician workflows.
- Showcase and spread current approaches that are effectively increasing clinical support and reducing administrative burden for family physicians. The OCFP is working to identify these examples.
- Remove financial barriers that undermine appropriate delegation.
Ready to Partner for a Healthier Ontario
The Ontario College of Family Physicians is ready to partner with government and healthcare leaders to continue taking steps to prioritize patient care by increasing access to family physicians. By reducing unnecessary red tape and ensuring family physicians have the right supports to stay focused on patients, Ontario can retain the family physicians we have now, and recruit for the future.
Across Ontario, patients and families can experience long waits for specialist appointments and diagnostic tests like MRIs and CT scans, often with no updates on the status of their referral. This lack of clarity can weigh heavily on patients and on the doctors helping them navigate their care. See our campaign to modernize our system so patients can get answers sooner, and family physicians can focus more on delivering care and less on managing referrals.
Media Headlines
The OCFP continues to raise the issues facing family physicians in media, across Ontario.