Ontario is on track to connect everyone in the province to a primary care provider by 2029, thanks in part to mostly clearing a wait list backlog, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said Monday.
About 275,000 people have been attached to primary care so far in the first year of the government's plan, Jones announced alongside Dr. Jane Philpott, the former federal health minister who was appointed by the Ontario government about one year ago to lead a primary care action team.
While the pace of connecting people to family doctors has to increase in subsequent years to hit the 2029 target, Jones said she is confident that will happen.
"Under Dr. Philpott's leadership, we are going to hit this goal," she said at a press conference.
More than half of that progress is due to moving more than 177,000 people off the Health Care Connect wait list, mostly by finding them a family doctor, officials said, though some people were removed because they had found care on their own or moved out of the province.
The auditor general has found that list is underutilized, with just 11 per cent of people in need of a primary care provider on it and fewer than 10 per cent of family doctors enrolling patients from that list.
Jones said the government is committed to improving the system.
"I would say that Health Care Connect was not being utilized as efficiently as it could be," she said. "Dr. Philpott's leadership in making sure that the individuals who are on Health Care Connect, who sign up today for Health Care Connect, have a much better patient experience than would have been the case a year ago."
When the government launched its primary care plan one year ago, it set an interim goal of attaching everyone on the Health Care Connect wait list as of Jan. 1, 2025 to primary care by spring 2026.
There were 234,000 people on the list as of the start of 2025 and now there are about 57,000, which the government said puts them on track to meet that goal. Another 91,000 people have added their names to that list since Jan. 1, 2025, officials said.
The government's latest estimate of how many Ontarians are without primary care is 1.98 million, and Liberal health critic Adil Shamji said far more people are going to need to be informed about Health Care Connect if the government hopes to attach them all.
"Ontario patients have no shortage of advertisements about the Ring of Fire and about Ontario Place, but how about getting the word out about this apparently rejuvenated, rehabilitated Health Care Connect?" he said.
"If this is actually the solution that Ontario patients have been dreaming about, well, they should act like they have confidence in the process and put some advertising behind it."
Jones noted that the government is also funding dozens of new primary care teams across the province that can accept thousands of patients, new seats at medical schools and speeding up the licensing process for out-of-province doctors moving to Ontario to practice.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 12, 2025.
