Why it’s hard to find a family doctor — and what’s being done about it – CBC
Spike in retirements making Ontario’s long-running shortage of family physicians more acute
Jan 31, 2023
When a physician can’t get a family doctor, you know there’s a problem.
Dr. Kimberly Thompson attended medical school in the Caribbean, did her clinical training in Chicago, then returned home to Toronto in 2019 to learn her family physician had retired.
“Ever since then, for the last few years, I’ve been trying to find a family doctor,” Thompson said in an interview with CBC Toronto.
Thompson is just one of the estimated 1.8 million Ontarians without a family physician.
That number increased sharply during the pandemic, which spurred hundreds of family doctors to stop practicing, and it’s poised to grow further still with many aging baby-boomer doctors planning to retire.
The trend is triggering a push for solutions to the family doctor shortage: making family practice more attractive to medical school graduates, streamlining family doctors’ paperwork to give them more time to see patients, and giving other health professionals a greater role in primary care.
