Clarington and other communities urging Province (again) to address family doctor shortage

A family doctor shortage that has been plaguing Ontario communities – especially rural and northern municipalities – will be back on the committee floor in Clarington Monday morning, with councillors looking to send a message to the Province that more funding is needed to address the problem.

The motion on the floor of Clarington’s General Government Committee is part of a campaign by the Association of Ontario Municipalities (AMO) to get the provincial government to step up and properly fund the system, with 2.3 million Ontarians lacking access to a family doctor.

There are emergency room closures across the province and 40 per cent of family doctors are considering retirement over the next five years, making a long-standing problem even worse, Ontario Medical Association CEO Kimberley Moran told delegates at the AMO annual conference last month.

“Communities across Ontario have been facing critical health-care challenges, including long waitlists for primary care, shortages of doctors and other health care workers; and emergency room closures,” Moran said. “These cracks in Ontario’s health care system are impacting economic development, health, and well-being at the local level.”

In Clarington, a growing number of residents have no family physician. Sixty per cent of the 100,000 visits to urgent care clinics in the community are from patients with no local family doctor, up “significantly” from approximately 43 per cent from five years ago.

Clarington Mayor Adrian Foster, who introduced the motion at committee Monday, said it has become “increasingly challenging” to attract and retain an adequate healthcare workforce throughout the health sector

“A robust workforce developed through a provincial, sector-wide health human resources strategy would significantly improve access to health services across the province”

Doctor shortages is a problem plaguing many towns in Durham and across Ontario (particularly in smaller and more remote communities) and even inspired a vastly underrated fish-out-of-water television comedy of the 1990s called Northern Exposure.

The problem is especially acute in northern Ontario, with communities short more than 350 physicians, including more than 200 family doctors. As well, half of the physicians working in northern Ontario expected to retire in the next five years.

Foster’s motion urges the Province to “recognize the physician shortage in the Municipality of Clarington and Ontario, to fund health care appropriately and ensure every Ontarian has access to physician care.”

Muncipalities like Clarington have been taking steps to beef up the pool of family doctors in the area in recent years: A program operating between 2007 and 2017 used an investment of $440,000 to attract 25 new family doctors to town, providing 30,000 Clarington residents access to family health care close to home.

Clarington followed that up with a $100,000 incentive program last year to recruit more doctors, with the initiative funded by a reserve fund.

That program would see the municipality provide a $25,000 incentive paid upfront upon the successful recruitment of a family physician to the medical clinic on King Street in Bowmanville. The clinic would also provide $25,000 per doctor, with the deal requiring the funds be paid back if the physician leaves within five years.

Each new doctor would be required to roster 1,000 patients to receive the grant.

The initiative is similar to a program launched by the Town of Whitby, which has committed $20,000 to try to coax more doctors to relocate to the town after residents said during community engagement for the new Strategic Plan that they considered attracting doctors one of their top priorities.

With Durham facing a shortage of approximately 145 family physicians, more incentives are still required to make up the shortfall, leading to Durham Region Council creating the region-wide Family Physician Recruitment Program to attract and retain family medicine trainees and family physicians to Durham Region.

The fund will also pay for a full-time family physician recruiter, with core funding expenses shared between the Region and local municipalities.

As well, a partnership between Lakeridge Health and Queen’s University’s Kingston medical school to bring more family doctors to the region is now in its second year.

Classes are underway for the second cohort of the unique Queen’s-Lakeridge Health MD Family Medicine Program, a first-in-Canada program designed specifically to train new family doctors to address the national shortage.

Everybody involved in the program is already committed to practicing as a family doctor as their major practice and a Lakeridge spokesperson said the program holds “tremendous promise” to increase access to primary care in Durham Region.

The program added 14 new undergraduate seats and 22 new postgraduate seats at the university in its first year to train family doctors specifically to work in Durham and the surrounding area.

The medical students are trained at Lakeridge Health Oshawa both in classes and for their residency.