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In an announcement Thursday, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the government plans to establish up to 80 new or expanded clinics — featuring teams of doctors, nurse practitioners and other health-care providers — based on postal codes with the biggest need in communities such as Toronto, Durham and Halton regions, Ottawa, and up north in Nipissing and Sudbury.

The $213 million funding is part of the government’s previously announced $1.8 billion commitment to reform the system by 2029.

While the province has estimated about two million people are without a doctor’s care, the Ontario Medical Association says that number is about double that.

Philpott, who the government has put in charge of reforming the health-care system, has advocated for care teams to which patients are assigned by postal code, much as students are allocated spots in their neighbourhood schools. That means when families move, they don’t need to worry about finding a new one.

“This is really good news, because we know that every single person in the province wants to have the opportunity to be attached to a primary care clinician or primary care team,” said Philpott, the head of the medical school at Queen’s University and a former federal health minister. “We can’t do it all overnight.”

Using postal codes will allow the government to “put some investments in teams in those areas to be able to have that big impact as quickly as possible, recognizing there is need everywhere,” she said. “We will, over time, ensure that everybody has that access to the front door of health care, but it will just take a little bit of time to get there, and we wanted to do it in a fair way.”

Last year, the province announced 78 new or expanded primary care teams.

Dr. Tara Kiran, a family physician and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto, said the call for proposals includes provisions that teams “need to provide really convenient care, digitally integrated care and care that’s culturally safe and linguistically responsive,” and that meets the needs of the public. 

“We absolutely need more people to have access to primary care, and I think this proposal is trying to do it both fast and fairly,” she said, while noting that it could be “challenging” to get a clinic up and running in mere months. 

Jones has said Ontario has the “highest rate of access to a regular health-care provider in the country,” with about one in 10 in need. Across Canada, about one in five are without a doctor.

The province uses numbers provided by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. But the Ontario Medical Association says by 2026, some 4.4 million Ontarians will be without primary care amid a shortage of physicians and as thousands of doctors are at or nearing retirement age.

Philpott said for “planning purposes, we’ve modelled out what it would take to provide new access to care for an additional two million people, and that will get us very close — and ideally, we will continue to refine our numbers as we get closer to our target of making sure everyone has access to care by 2029.”

Kiran said while there are different numbers out there, “what everyone agrees on, regardless of which number you choose, the number is too big.”

Those without a family doctor tend to be diagnosed with cancer and other serious conditions later, with worsening health outcomes. 

Dr. Adil Shamji, a Liberal MPP and emergency room physician, said the government’s actions were “a step forward” but “at a pace that is too slow to ensure everyone is connected by 2029. He called the announcement “a Band-Aid for a gaping wound.”

Philpott said the team approach provides some flexibility and choice for the clinics, “because we know that when people work together in teams, they can provide more expansive hours of access, and they can actually take on more patients.” 

One such example is the Midtown Kingston Health Home, an early example of Philpott’s model that opened last July. There, family doctors and nurse practitioners work in teams. The clinic offers care for diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and access to social workers, mainly to those in the K7M postal code, helping to clear thousands off the wait-list. 

Jones also said the province has opened new medical schools and added extra spots to existing ones — although it will take several years before those medical students are on the job — and added about 15,000 new doctors and 100,000 new nurses since 2018.