Federal government signs $3.1 billion health deal with Ontario – Winnipeg Free Press

Ontario will use $3.1 billion in federal health funding to increase access to family doctors, reduce backlogs and add health workers, the premier and premier announced Friday as they signed off on a decade-long health deal.

The funding covers three years of an $8.4 billion, 10-year deal the federal government reached with the province last year, part of a total of $198.6 billion in health care funding across the country. Ontario is the fifth province to officially sign up for its contribution.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the money would help ease the pressures facing health systems across the country.

“Access to family doctors and nurses is not necessary,” he said at a press conference.

“Emergency rooms are full. People are waiting too long for surgery, and the medical staff … are working in very difficult conditions and are under a lot of pressure. That's why we are focused on solving these problems.”

Premier Doug Ford says Ontario has made progress in reducing wait times and increasing access to primary care, but more needs to be done.

“This $3.1 billion investment will be used for targeted initiatives to continue building our health workforce, improve access to family health services, improve mental health and addictions programs, and expand access to digital health,” he said.

“This will help ensure that people in Ontario continue to get the high-quality, convenient care they need, when they need it.”

The Ontario Nurses Association questioned rosy statistics presented by Premier and Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones at a press conference, including the number of new nurses in the province.

“If we have so many new nurses, why is Ontario seeing hundreds of emergency departments continue to close due to nursing shortages?” president Erin Aris said in a statement.

A report by Ontario's auditor general late last year found that 203 emergency departments across the province were temporarily closed between July 2022 and June 2023.

Amid this strain on the system, one in five patients who came to the ER were only there because they didn't have a family doctor and didn't need emergency care, the report said.

According to the Ontario Medical Association, 2.3 million people in Ontario do not have a family doctor, and the association predicts that number will double within two years.

“Ontario's physicians welcome this funding to help address some of the most pressing issues,” OMA President Dr. Andrew Park wrote in a statement.

“In addition to addressing the most pressing issues, we need to ensure that we have a long-term, sustainable funding formula to address the underlying issues in the system and build for the future, knowing that we have an aging and medically complex patient population.”

The OMA said it hoped Ottawa would increase the federal share of health care spending from 22 per cent to 35 per cent, as demanded by the provinces. The agreement increases the percentage to 24 percent.

Most of what Ontario is committing to using the funding for are multi-year programs that have been announced in the past, and officials say it will help the province build on what's already being done.

The province says $30 million a year will help build a primary care team including doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and social workers.

Ontario also says it will allocate $69 million a year to help internationally educated health professionals, including expanding a program to allow internationally trained nurses to work in the province more quickly and launching a program to rapidly assess an international doctor's ability to practice immediately.

The province has also agreed to allocate $40 million a year to expand medical school enrollment, with 60 per cent of postgraduate enrollment in family medicine and 71 positions specifically at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

All provinces that agree to the agreement must work to update their health data systems, starting with making patient records accessible and portable between jurisdictions.

Provinces must measure their progress against targets set by the Canadian Institute for Health Information and report this progress publicly every year.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on February 9, 2024.