The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) told an online news conference Tuesday that the physician shortage and health care crisis in Ontario is as bad as it ever was — catastrophic even — but things in Northern Ontario are even worse, with a lower life expectancy and the opioid crisis creating a higher death rate in the North than in the rest of Ontario.
The news conference was hosted by Ontario Medical Association (OMA) president Dr. Dominik Nowak, who said he was speaking on behalf of more than 43,000 physicians across Ontario for the OMA's Stop The Crisis campaign.
Nowak said more than 2.5 million Ontario residents do not have a family doctor and that figure is expected to rise beyond 4.4 million patients with no doctor in less than two years.
"Emergency departments are crowded. In many communities, they're struggling just to stay open. Patients still have to wait too long for appointments, tests and care up to the point that's become dangerous for many folks as they wait and linger, languishing on wait lists," said Nowak.
One of the speakers at the online event was Dr. Sarah Newbery of Marathon. She is a rural family physician and the assistant dean of physician workforce strategy at Northern Ontario School of Medicine University.
She told the news conference that to put Northern Ontario in context she said it was the size of France and Germany combined yet with a population of only 800,000 residents.
She said it is not easy to provide health care in the largest part of Ontario.
"Delivering care here is hard. Being a patient here is harder. We know that Northern Ontario citizens have worse health outcomes than those in the rest of the province,” Newbery said. “We know that their life expectancy is two to two and a half years less than the provincial average. We know that doctor shortages and other staff shortages are leading to challenges of timely and equitable access to care.”
She said physician recruitment is a full-time endeavour across the North, but not always successful.
"We know that in June of 2023, across Northern Ontario, we were actively recruiting for more than 350 full-time equivalent doctors, more than 200 of those needed to be family doctors. We don't have all of the data yet for 2024, but the number has certainly trended up, and it appears now that we are actively recruiting for just over 400 physicians across Northern Ontario," said Newbery.
"That is roughly a quarter of the entire doctor workforce that works here in Northern Ontario.”
She added that Northern Ontario communities are now engaged in an incentive competition trying to win more physicians to their cities and towns.
Newbery said a formal strategy is needed to entice more doctors to rural and remote communities.
“First, we need a Northern and rural physician workforce strategy to help to co-ordinate the ways in which we train, retain and recruit doctors for Northern Ontario," said Newbery.
"We recommend that the government work with the OMA to develop and implement, without delay, a Northern physician workforce strategy, including the creation of a coordination centre that can come to understand the needs of communities and also the needs of physicians.”
In addition she said the creation of a Northern workforce strategy would be modelled on British Columbia's rural co-ordination centre.
"We need to pay special attention to those medical disciplines in highest demand, and those include family medicine, paediatrics, psychiatry, obstetrics or maternal health, anesthesiology and internal medicine. Additionally, as medical schools across the province and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University expand the number of medical learners that we have, we need to retain a focus on doctors as teachers."
Newbery said another urgent need is to find ways to keep hospital services and Emergency Rooms open in all remote hospitals and this would mean removing any administrative or paperwork barriers to allow doctors to cover off shifts and medical services in other nearby hospitals.
As he wrapped up the news conference OMA president Nowak said the province needs to step up with additional funding and resources to make it possible for more health care professionals to work and to get Ontario's health system restored with some sense of stability.
Len Gillis covers health care as well as the mining industry for Sudbury.com.
