Let’s help Ontario’s primary care teams catch their breath
Ontario is investing $1.8 billion to expand primary care teams and improve health outcomes for millions. It’s an exciting step forward, but one vital organ cannot be left out. The one we use 20,000 times a day: our lungs.
Respiratory illness is one of the leading reasons people in Ontario visit emergency rooms, are hospitalized or require long-term care. As Ontario reimagines its primary care system, there’s an exciting opportunity to better support lung health by including lung health specialists—like Respiratory Therapists and Certified Respiratory Educators (CREs). Their expertise could make a real difference in keeping people healthier and out of hospital.
Ontario’s Primary Care Act and its Action Plan are modelled after the OurCare framework, which highlights the need for team-based care and system-wide performance measures. Lung health fits both mandates. Respiratory conditions account for a massive share of hospital usage—24% of admissions, 30% of home care and 35% of long-term care beds. Yet the system has largely ignored these patients.
Read: Dr. Hector Baillie: Tobacco and disease
At the Lung Health Foundation, we’ve spent nearly two decades running the Primary Care Asthma and COPD Program (PCAP), a proven, evidence-based model funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Health that brings lung health professionals right into primary care settings and clinics. And it works.
In one year alone, PCAP teams diagnosed more than 6,000 cases of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). They helped cut ER visits and hospitalizations for asthma and COPD by 80%. They brought care to patients remotely, reducing the need for in-person visits. They provided personalized education, helped patients stick to their medications, and created action plans that helped people manage their conditions at home.
What they really did was help people breathe easier—and stay out of the hospital.
These aren’t abstract policy points. They’re families sleeping through the night without fear of an asthma attack. Seniors walking their grandkids to school again. Young adults catching their breath, literally and metaphorically, so they can work, study and enjoy their lives. Lung health care is life-changing and lifesaving.
Lung conditions don’t just cause suffering. They’re expensive. COPD accounts for a quarter of all hospitalizations in Ontario. Lung cancer still kills more Canadians than any other form of cancer. Asthma affects one in 13 Ontarians. And tobacco-related illness drains $7 billion from the province’s health care system every year. The math is simple: investing in respiratory care saves lives and money. Yet, pulmonary rehabilitation—proven to save $7.7 million annually—is only accessible to 0.4% of patients in the province.
But there’s also something deeper. People with some forms of lung disease often carry shame. “Did you smoke?” is asked more often than “How can I help?” We need to move past blame and build systems rooted in compassion, access, and evidence.
Ontario’s health leaders have shown real courage in expanding care. We’re asking them to take it one step further to include the lungs in a truly comprehensive system. Lung health professionals are ready. They’re trained. They’re proven. Let them do what they do best: prevent crises, empower patients, and keep people well.
It’s time to give Ontario’s health care teams the full strength of support they need. It’s time to breathe lung health into the heart of our system.
Jessica Moffatt is the pulmonary medicine and vice-president, programs and health systems partnerships at the Lung Health Foundation.