After a video surfaced of hundreds of people waiting in a walk-in clinic line went viral, there’s no ignoring the doctor shortage growing in Ontario.
In a video taken at a clinic in Walkerton, ON, patients in need are shown waiting tirelessly to be seen by a medical professional, an accurate visual representation of the staggering number of Ontarians without a family doctor—one in four, to be exact, according to the Ontario Medical Association (OMA).
“We saw the lines a few days ago…I’m seeing over 1000 people lining up as early as two in the morning facing a snowstorm, just at a chance of getting a family doctor, and it’s really with disastrous consequences for a lot of people,” Dr. Dominik Nowak, OMA president, told Now Toronto.
EFFECTS OF DOCTOR SHORTAGE BECOMING MORE VISIBLE
As more medical professionals are expected to retire in coming years, the scarcity of family doctors is only increasing in Ontario.
Nowak, a family doctor at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, said he meets people who haven’t been able to find a family doctor in years.
“A few months ago, I ran into someone who had been looking for six years. Meanwhile, they were bouncing around hospitals, emergency rooms, walk-in clinics, pharmacies, and ended up getting a diagnosis, severe breast cancer,” Nowak said. “That’s all too common of a story right now in Ontario.”
According to HealthForceOntario, which posts job openings for physicians, more than 2,500 physicians are needed in the province.
Nowak said the issue will only increase if the province doesn’t step up.
While news of medical school expansions, such as Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Medicine set to open in Sept. 2025, is encouraging to Nowak, he says the right support is necessary for the teachers who will be training these students.
“We’ve had announcements around expansions to the schools, but no news around what kind of support—how we’ll actually train those new doctors, and what kind of support the teachers and the schools are going to have to make that happen?” Nowak said. “There are some optimistic things in our healthcare system, but the details we’ll still have to work on and we’ll have to push to make sure that the province is ambitious enough to make sure that we can get out of the mess that we’re in in healthcare.”
RURAL COMMUNITIES FEELING THE AFFECTS
According to Nowak, people in rural and northern communities in Ontario live two and a half years shorter than those in all other parts of the province.
“In large part, that’s due to lack of access to healthcare, they’re missing a quarter of their physician workforce, and that means that the people that are there, just like in the rest of the province, the fewer of us there are, the more challenging the work becomes.”
In fact, rural Ontarians are losing primary care providers at a rate of 12 per cent per year, according to the Rural Ontario Municipal Association.
“The challenges in the north and rural communities are even more severe,” Nowak said. “These small communities, they rely on a handful of docs.”
Nowak urges people to seek out a family doctor accepting patients if they can, but mainly, he calls on the province to address the crisis.
“Healthcare is a provincial responsibility, so let your provincial representative know what your experience in healthcare is, that you can’t find a family doctor, how long you’ve been waiting, what impact that’s had on you,” Nowak urged. “We need to make healthcare an election issue.
That’s the way to get out of this mess. We’re in crisis, catastrophe, right now in healthcare and this government really needs to own that and get things back on track in healthcare.”
