This email was sent to EDs/Admin leads, board chairs and lead MDs/NPs of AFHTO member teams
Dear Triad Members,
Today Health Minister Sylvia Jones launched Your Health: A Plan for Connected and Convenient Care, a plan that sets the vision and direction for Ontario’s health system strategy for the next few years. With a strategy focused on the patient experience by developing system capacity through increasing the health workforce, expanding ways people can access care and investing in health infrastructure, the plan focuses on three pillars:
- The right care in the right place – increasing access to care in community-based settings that improve convenience and relieve pressure on hospitals, long term care facilities and other areas of the health care system;
- Faster access to care – focused on cutting wait times which has led to delayed care, including backlogs for non-urgent surgeries and diagnostic procedures like MRI and CT scans;
- Hiring more health care workers – which includes new commitments to tackle the HHR crisis through further education and training, especially in hospitals, primary care settings, long term care homes and home care.
In the first pillar, the plan talks about bringing together primary care. Two new commitments were announced that will help support organizing primary care and expanding access to team-based care:
- An investment of $30 million to create up to 18 new teams and help bridge the gap in accessing interprofessional primary care for vulnerable, marginalized, and unattached patients to ensure they are able to connect to care where and when they need it. In addition, this expansion will support primary care integration within Ontario Health Teams and sustain direct service delivery in existing interprofessional primary care teams that are experiencing increased operating costs.
- Create a connected health care system through Ontario Health Teams by supporting collaboration and engagement with primary care providers across the province through the creation of primary care networks. Every Ontario Health Team will include a group of primary care providers organized in a network to be part of decision-making and to improve access to care for patients.
AFHTO has been advocating for years around expansion of team-based care and we were pleased to see the first large investment to expand teams in the province in a number of years. The details of what the implementation will look like (new teams or expansion of already existing teams) is still being worked through and we hope to provide you with more information as we continue to dialogue with the Ministry and Ontario Health.
As part of that first commitment, it is also our assumption that already existing teams will be able to access funding to offset their increased operating costs. Once again, we will provide you with further details as they become available as we know many of you are dealing with increased costs that cannot be managed within your already constrained budgets.
The formation of primary care networks is something that has happened organically in many OHT regions across the province and having this acknowledged in the plan is the first step toward organizing primary care and giving the important voice that the sector needs into local OHT planning, decision-making and collaboration. AFHTO, along with our partners at the Ontario College of Family Physicians and the OMA Section on General and Family Practice, has been advocating for the creation of these networks of family physicians, nurse practitioners and community specialists (where appropriate) in order to truly ensure primary care is the foundation of the OHTs and the health care system.
The plan also provided details around increasing the health workforce by increasing the number of training spots for health care professionals every year including:
- 455 new spots for physicians in training (160 undergraduate and 295 postgraduate)
- 52 new physician assistant training spots
- 150 new nurse practitioner spots
- 1,500 additional nursing spots
Expanding education and training programs through the Learn and Stay grant was announced as was the “As of Right” to allow health care workers registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start working and caring for people without first having to register with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges.
What is not mentioned in the plan is a compensation strategy to address wage inequity between sectors and the need to increase salaries to keep up with inflation and cost of living. The government confirmed that there is separate work being done around this as they are looking at all sectors to support ongoing retention strategies. A reminder that AFHTO is working with our partners on a Compensation Market Salary Review to provide government with data to highlight the disparity in salary levels in the community/primary care level.
There is a lot to digest in this plan and over the next few weeks we will provide you with more information as we find out more details. While we had hoped for more investments to ensure more Ontarians have access to team-based care, this is great news for team-based care which we hope will lead to further investments over the next few years.
As always, please reach out if you have any questions.
Yours in Good Health,
The AFHTO Team
Resources:
- News Release EN FR
- Your Health: A Plan for Connected and Convenient Care EN FR
- Stakeholder Briefing Slide Deck
- Minister’s Press Conference Announcement
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