WCHC among recipients of new funding for primary care providers
THE WOOLWICH COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTRE
in St. Jacobs was among primary care providers handed $110 million in extra funding from the Ontario government in a bid to stem the crisis of unregistered patients.
Kitchener-Conestoga MPP Mike Harris last Friday announced the province will provide almost $1.5 million in two teams in the riding.
The other practice being given taxpayers’ money is the Waterloo Region Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic (WRNLC) in Kitchener.
“This investment will ensure our community has greater access to quality primary healthcare services closer to home,” Harris said at the announcement February 16 in Kitchener.
The funding is designed to help around 300,000 of the 2.3 million Ontarians without family doctors get signed up by primary care providers. The number of those without a family physician is expected to rise to 4.4 million within three years.
Rosslyn Bentley, the chief executive of the Woolwich Community Health Centre (WCHC),
said they would use the money to help a range of people get the care they need.
“We are grateful this initiative will help us to attach rural Waterloo Region residents to local primary care providers,” she said
“Serving Wellesley, Wilmot, and Woolwich townships, our team
sees growing numbers of newcomers, refugees, seniors, and those with mental health concerns who lack a regular primary care provider.
“The province’s investment will help us address the growing issue of access to a provider, while also helping to reduce ER visits and wait times that stem
from delayed access to preventative care.”
WCHC is a team-based care organization with several physicians, nurses and other practitioners that the government hopes will help ease this crisis.
Aside from its main office in St. Jacobs, the organization also runs the Linwood Nurse Practitioner Office and the Wellesley Township Community Health Centre.
By not registering patients with a single doctor, the Canadian Medical Association says such team-based carers offer taxpayers better value for money and give patients a broader range of services.
They also say organizations like WCHC help reduce the burden of retiring physicians, which is a big driver of the current crisis.
There are currently 2.7 million people in the province who are looked after by a family doctor over the age of 65.
At current trends, 500,000 patients a year are losing their physicians.
This is not helped by the fact that there are also a decreasing number of new doctors who want to pursue general practice.
“Ten years ago, 80 per cent of doctors were doing that cradle-to-grave family medicine,” said Dr. David Barber, chair of the Ontario Medical Association’s section on general and family practice, in a recent interview.
“That’s down to about 65 per cent, which is crazy.
That’s a loss of 2,200 family doctors.”
With family doctors having an average of 1,000 patients on their roster, dealing with the existing number of Ontarians without such primary care would require an additional 2,500 physicians.
The OMA said it would take a lot more than the province’s $110 million to fix the problem, which the government acknowledged in Friday’s announcement of the clinics receiving extra funding.
“While there is more work to do, giving hundreds of thousands of more Ontarians the opportunity to connect to primary care brings us that much closer to this goal,” said Minister of Health Sylvia Jones in a release.