Let’s include everyone to build strong patient care teams

This week, the Ontario government announced its second round of expression of interest to bolster teams to help attach patients to primary care. There is an opportunity to optimize their approach to ensure every Ontarian has a family doctor.One of the main challenges with the government’s strategy is how they are directing the funding to only Family Health Teams, Community Health Centres, Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics, and Indigenous Primary Health Care Organizations. While this is a helpful start, the reality is that 82% of family doctors in Ontario practice outside of these models, making them ineligible for this funding.So, while the government is announcing hundreds of millions of dollars to create new teams to attach patients, they are excluding the large majority of doctors who can actually attach patients to longitudinal family medicine practices. If the physicians choose to change their practices and pursue the lengthy and complicated process to try to become a FHT or CHC, they may qualify but why have the added administrative step?Read: Ontario seeking proposals for second batch of primary care teamsOntario’s doctors want more than anything to have everyone connected to a family practice. Of those in the province who currently have access to primary care, family doctors are responsible for attaching 98.5% of them and to not include all of them in this funding is a missed opportunity. The Ontario Medical Association has offered recommendations to the government on how best to improve the process. Our solutions are simple: expand the eligibility of who can benefit from this funding and ensure the dollars are going to teams who can support physicians in attaching patients. Funding needs to be used to build patient core teams comprised of physicians and other health-care professionals, who work to their optimal scope to provide comprehensive, longitudinal primary care to the patient. Here, the entire team is focused on the objective of attaching patients and providing timely access to high-quality primary care.There are more than 2.5 million patients in the province who do not have a family doctor and that number is growing and will balloon to more than 4.4 million by 2026. To tackle a problem of this magnitude, we need to have all of our resources engaged and focused on the solution.Right now, we’re trying to respond to this issue with only a small but dedicated portion of the entire team. To solve this, we need the help everyone can provide, which includes all family physicians and all health professionals working together to attach patients and provide them the care they deserve. Ontarians should settle for nothing less. Dr. Zainab Abdurrahman is the president of the Ontario Medical Association.

Let’s include everyone to build strong patient care teams

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