Why it's hard to find a family doctor — and what's being done about it
CBC
When a physician can't get a family doctor, you know there's a problem.
Dr. Kimberly Thompson attended medical school in the Caribbean, did her clinical training in Chicago, then returned home to Toronto in 2019 to learn her family physician had retired.
"Ever since then, for the last few years, I've been trying to find a family doctor," Thompson said in an interview with CBC Toronto.
Thompson is just one of the estimated 1.8 million Ontarians without a family physician.
That number increased sharply during the pandemic, which spurred hundreds of family doctors to stop practicing, and it's poised to grow further still with many aging baby-boomer doctors planning to retire.
The trend is triggering a push for solutions to the family doctor shortage: making family practice more attractive to medical school graduates, streamlining family doctors' paperwork to give them more time to see patients, and giving other health professionals a greater role in primary care.
The family doctor shortage has an impact even on patients who have one, because of ripple effects elsewhere in the health system.
Long-established research has found people without a regular family physician have greater reliance on emergency rooms and are more likely to end up hospitalized.
For Thompson, her go-to source of primary health care has been walk-in clinics.
"Even though the family doctors that I did see there were very helpful … I was constantly having to retell my story, retell my medical history," she said.
Addressing Ontario's family doctor crunch is a complex task that won't be quickly achieved, experts say. It's not as simple as increasing the number of spots in the province's medical schools.
There's been a steady and significant decline in the proportion of newly trained Canadian doctors choosing family medicine. Those who do make that choice need to find someone within the dwindling crop of currently practising family physicians to supervise them.
"We don't have enough family doctors in the system right now. Every patient in Ontario should have a family doctor," said Dr. Rose Zacharias, president of the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), the group that represents all doctors in the province.
"We can say we have a doctor shortage and we need more physicians, but we need to be very strategic about what type of physicians we need where," Zacharias said in an interview.
Jenelle Hughes says she worries every time her two older children take their car to get to Fanshawe College in London, Ont., from their home in Dutton.
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