Former federal Liberal health minister Jane Philpott has been appointed by the Ontario government to ensure every resident in the province is connected with a primary care provider in the next five years.
Philpott will lead a new primary care action team within the Ministry of Health with a goal of finding every person in Ontario a family doctor or nurse practitioner working in a publicly funded team before 2030.
There are currently more than 2.5 million Ontarians without a family doctor, up from 1.8 million in 2020, according to data from the Ontario College of Physicians. More than 160,000 people were added to the list of those without a family doctor in a six-month period alone, the data indicates….