Gap in Primary Care Physician Services

The job of recruiting family doctors starts by understanding where the gaps in primary care services are. To identify the areas where the people do not have access to a family doctor or other primary care provider, the OPRA team requests data from the Ministry of Health, which is compared to the 2023 census data.

With this information, it is possible to track the number of primary care physicians operating in each community and see information about the total number of people enrolled with these physicians. Information about the type of enrolled model these physicians use is also collected: Family Health Groups (FHG), Comprehensive Care Models (CHC), Family Health Organizations (FHO), and those in FHOs who are grouped into something called a Family Health Team (FHT). There are other kinds of models like blended ones and alternative funding models.

Uses and limitations of INSPIRE data

When the number of enrolling physicians in an area is known along with the total number of people enrolled to that physician, it is possible to track the primary care needs of each of the communities (that have a family doctor recruitment lead). Of note, the enrollment data does not include clients of Community Health Centres, pediatric patients who are not enrolled to a family physicians, patients in Long Term Care homes who are not enrolled, and those seeing a doctor at a walk-in-clinic.

Our population in Ontario has skyrocketed to over 15.5 million residents based on our census estimate for 2023. With the 9,422 family physicians who enroll patients in a comprehensive family medicine enrollment model, we know that they enroll 11.3 million people across our province. This leaves 4.2 million people unrostered or unenrolled.

These 4.2 million people are either being seen at walk-in clinics, emergency departments, shelter health or community health centres (clients of these centres), pediatric patients who are not enrolled with a family doctors or are not receiving care at all.