More than 15,000 Torontonians now have a family doctor thanks to two new services being offered by a health team in the city.
Mid-West Toronto Ontario Health Team (MWH-OHT), a health team that serves neighbourhoods from Casa Loma to Exhibition Place, launched two complementary services to boost Torontonians’ access to primary care in their community earlier this year.
These services allow patients to access the community team, which takes a team-based approach to provide care like mental health counselling and nutrition, while a primary care attachment liaison helps connect them with a family doctor.
“Suddenly, this person not only has a primary care provider, but they also have a social worker to talk about their mental health, a dietitian to talk about their diabetes management, a nurse that’s going to look at their foot care,” Justine Humphries, executive lead of Mid-West Toronto Ontario Health and vice president of strategy, people and partnership at Kensington Health, said in an interview with CTV News Toronto.
“So, somebody that might have been in the system, struggling to get the health care that they need, now has sort of a whole team working with them to provide care.”
Of the 15,000 new Torontonians who have been connected to a primary care provider through the services so far, 9,000 of those people were on the waitlist for a family doctor since before January of last year.
Dr. Faye Goldman, a family doctor and co-chair of the Mid-West Toronto Ontario Health Family Practice Network, says part of the advantage of the program is that the liaison can significantly speed up the onboarding of new patients.
Onboarding a new patient, she said, otherwise requires finding their chart medical records, opening a new chart and adding that information, orienting the patient to their new family doctor’s practice, and instructing the scheduling and screening requirements.
“That often takes hours of time,” Goldman said. “As a family doctor, reviewing old previous records is our after-hours fun reading, which can be hundreds and hundreds of pages to go through and to supplement.”
Then, during the first appointment, Dr. Goldman says it takes about 30 to 40 minutes to go over a new patient’s medical history. With the attachment liaison, though, Goldman says she has everything she needs right as she greets her patient in her office, saving her hours of her time.
“All of that has been taken over by this attachment liaison, so when I open up this new patient chart, I’ve never seen this person before, they’re in front of me, everything is there, and we can just focus on what to do next,” Goldman said.
The need for family doctors
In late 2025, the Ontario Medical Association reported then that more than 2.5 million Ontarians do not have a family doctor while about half of family physicians (52 per cent) are considering retirement within the next five years.
Their findings also showed only 42 per cent of medical students in the province are considering family medicine for their careers, with only half of that figure expressing the desire to provide cradle-to-grave care.
By 2026, the Ontario College of Family Physicians (OCFP) projected up to 4.4 million Ontarians could be without a family doctor should these trends continue.
Humphries attributed how quickly the health team has tackled the waitlist due to the funding and resources they have received through Healthcare Connect, the province’s online registry matching residents to primary care clinicians.
“We have received more funding to add more resources to the team, and we hope to continue to apply for more resources so that we can really scale this program for the entire midwest Toronto area,” Humphries said.
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For its part, the Ontario College of Family Physicians says that the path to ultimately “fixing Ontario’s family doctor shortage is making family medicine a career doctors choose and stay in.”
“That means ensuring family doctors have manageable workloads, strong team-based supports, and less administrative burden,” the OCFP said in a statement.
“Every hour spent on paperwork is an hour not spent with patients, which is why reducing administrative burden and improving coordination across the system are some of the key ways to retain family doctors, attract the next generation of physicians and improve access to care for patients across Ontario.”
A spokesperson for the province’s health ministry, meanwhile, pointed to Ontario’s recent multi-billion-dollar investment toward its Primary Care Action Plan.
This $3.4 billion injection aims to connect every Ontarian to primary care over the next three years, spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said, by expanding interprofessional primary care teams that include family doctors, nurse practitioners and other allied health professionals to deliver coordinated, patient-centered care.
It’s why programs like Mid-West Toronto Ontario Health’s could benefit patients and family physicians alike, in Goldman’s view. While these initiatives have connected Ontarians to primary care—some who Goldman says have not seen a family doctor in a while—she also said they provide support to family doctors, especially those who are feeling burnt out.
“What we can do right now is really support those family doctors in their day-to-day practice and, I think, our goal is to bring back the joy in practice,” Goldman said.
