In Ontario, it’s become almost a bragging point to say you have a family doctor.
Over the past two years, I’ve spent many hours in the ER either waiting to be seen by a doctor or receiving treatment, and I’ve spent even more hours seeing my family doctor in person or talking to her over the phone.
Each time I was in the ER, I thought about the resources I was taking up. Doctors knew what was wrong with me, but the only thing that could help was surgery, and I was on a two-year wait-list. Every time I called to make an appointment with my GP, I thought about the other patients she could be helping instead of trying to help me manage my symptoms.
At one point, she was calling up surgeons across the province in hopes of getting me an earlier surgery date. I’m certain she did a lot of those calls in her downtime, because whenever I was at her office, it was non-stop patient after patient. It wasn’t unusual to wait days, sometimes weeks, for an appointment with her, but at least I had access to her on the phone. Even though I was able to finally get surgery in December 2023, the after-effects meant that I needed more care.
Unfortunately, surgery wasn’t the panacea I was so desperately hoping for. My family doctor was the one I turned to, the one who helped me access additional MRIs, sent referrals to the pain clinic. She’s the one who managed my post-operative treatment. I don’t know what I would have done without her. She didn’t help just me — she also helped my kids get their mother back. Even now, she’s helping both me and them manage the trauma they experienced throughout my illness.
According to the Ontario College of Family Physicians, in March 2020, 1.8 million Ontarians were without a family doctor. By July 2024, that number had shot up to 2.5 million. It’s now projected that one in four Ontarians — 4.4 million people — will be without a family doctor by 2026.
Earlier this year, a clinic in Sault Ste. Marie said it would have to drop 10,000 of its patients due to a lack of doctors caused by “retirement or resignations.”
The CBC spoke to people in that community. Barry Armstrong, 85, said, “I suspect I will never have another family doctor during my lifetime.” Another patient said, “To me, it’s creating a lot of anxiety that I don’t have a family doctor.” She shared that she’d had go to the ER, where she waited 12 hours just to get a prescription renewed. Another patient added, “If I have issues like I’ve had in the past and I don’t have a medical doctor, I may not make it, because it’s going to take too long to figure out what’s wrong with me. I’ll be six feet under.”
One of the patients who was dropped and hasn’t been able to find a new doctor is pursuing legal action.
In May, the Ontario government announced a new outpatient clinic that could take some of those patients. I personally can’t stop thinking about how stressful it must have been to receive a letter saying you’d been de-rostered, what it would have felt like to find out you’d be losing a constant figure in your health care.
Many Ontarians are willing to drive long distances to keep their family doctor. Some 670,000 Ontarians live at least 51 kilometres from their doctor. “More than 130,000 Ontarians live more than 200 km from their family doctor,” reads a release from the OCFP, “the distance between Toronto and areas such as Parry Sound, Belleville or London.” Those who need care, then, wouldn’t be able to access it as quickly as possible. Those who don’t have easy access to a car or public transit would face even more challenges.
Family doctors are our gateway to the health-care system. When Ontarians had the same doctor for most of their lifetimes, that meant continuity and prevention — a benefit not only to the individual but to the system. Without them, some people will find out about serious health issues only when they’ve gone to the ER.
That’s what happened to Nadine McKenzie. As she tells Toronto Life, she’d signed up for a family doctor and been waiting for six years when she felt a pain in her chest. She went to a walk-in, but there were too many people, and staff told her to go home. Three weeks later, the pain was getting worse, so she went to the ER. There, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer that had spread into her lungs. She says she’s still looking for a family doctor for her family: “My cancer was aggressive, but I think having a doctor would have changed my outcome. I could have received a diagnosis at Stage 1 or even before it became a problem at all. And navigating my treatment would have been a lot easier if I’d had someone to advocate for me.”
And without family doctors, people can end up in the ER with conditions that may not be considered emergencies.
Years ago, I was one of those people: I used the ER to access care for my newborn.
I moved back to Ontario when my son was eight weeks old. When we lived in the United Kingdom, we had direct access to a nurse or doctor. After my son was born, a nurse visited us for weeks after he’d come home from hospital. But when I moved back to Canada in 2011, I couldn’t find a doctor. For months, I kept thinking to myself, this is how children disappear. What if I had been a negligent mother? What if I hadn’t been feeding my child properly? What if I simply didn’t know how to properly care for him? None of the doctors I saw in the ER showed any interest — he wasn’t their patient. That wasn’t the fault of those hardworking physicians; it was obvious even then that the bandwidth was stretched.
Finally, I begged a friend to ask her pediatrician if he could take my son. He finally relented, and, at four months old, my son had a doctor. At that point, I was unsure about vaccines and what to do — I’d wound up on internet forums rife with disinformation and misinformation about the harms I could do to my child if I listened to doctors.
He told me that he treated his patients as if they were his family and that he would always be available to answer any questions I had, without judgment. As a new mom, I felt like I’d won the golden ticket.
A few years later, he retired. I then begged another friend to speak to their GP, who eventually took all of us. She retired during the pandemic; it’s the doctor who replaced her who’s been shepherding me through my health crises.
Finding a doctor shouldn’t take luck. It shouldn’t take begging or knowing the right people. All Ontarians should be able to access primary care — without needing to win a golden ticket.
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