With a $2.1 million investment by the Ontario government, over 4,500 more residents of the city and county of Peterborough will have a permanent primary care provider within the next year.
On Friday (May 29), Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith announced the funding as part of the province’s Primary Care Action Plan and a commitment to connecting every Ontarian to primary care by 2029.
The funding followed a successful application led by the Peterborough Family Health Team, with support from the Peterborough 360 Degree Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic, Peterborough Community Health Centre, Peterborough Street Medicine, Peterborough Newcomer Health Clinic, and the New Canadians Centre, in partnership with the Peterborough Ontario Health Team.
Funding will support Connect Clinic expansion to move 2,700 unattached patients to primary care
“Family medicine and primary care are the keys to keeping a cost manageable, compassionate system,” said Peterborough Family Health Team CEO Duff Sprague in a interview with kawarthaNOW following the announcement.
As part of the second round of funding under the Ford government’s Primary Care Action Plan, the Peterborough announcement came a little over one month after news from the City of Kawartha Lakes Family Health Team that it was the recipient of $1.834 million under the plan.
The largest portion of the Peterborough funding, $1.16 million, will go towards the Peterborough Family Health Team’s Connect Clinic, which operates from two downtown locations at 185 King Street and 555 George Street North.
The Connect Clinic provides transitional support and wraparound care to currently unattached patients while they are waiting to be matched with a family physician or nurse practitioner.
According to a media release from the Peterborough Family Health Team, the Connect Clinic has supported 6,600 patients since its launch, with over 1,000 successfully transitioning to permanent primary care providers within the region.
Sprague told kawarthaNOW that the new provincial funding will expand resources at the Connect Clinic through the recruitment of one nurse practitioner, two registered practical nurses, one registered nurse, three administrative staff, and one pharmacist.
He said the additional staff capacity is intended to enable the Connect Clinic to serve more patients and increase the number of attachments made to permanent primary care providers.
“We have agreed to move 2,700 patients through the Connect Clinic between now and the end of March 2027,” Sprague said
Sprague said that, during the Peterborough Family Health Team’s discussions with the government, the province agreed the Connect Clinic may act as a “transitional attachment” for patients, but the long-term goal must be to move them from the clinic on to a longer-term relationship with a family physician, nurse practitioner, or primary care team, as opportunities become available.
Approximately 90 physicians are supported by the Peterborough Family Health Team through the provision of nurse practitioners, nurses, mental health workers, dietitians, pharmacists, and administrative staff.
Sprague said that a key goal of the Connect Clinic is to build a complete medical record to support patients transitioning to a new physician, or as they go through the medical system at large.
“You’re not going to be starting from scratch, and it’s going to be a far easier transition into the practice,” he explained.
Funding will also support those facing barriers to healthcare, including newcomers and unhoused or precariously housed people
Many of the partner organizations receiving the new provincial funding work with individuals who face barriers to care and may not have had regular care or supervision by a physician in a number of years.
For instance, the Peterborough Newcomer Health Clinic, which operates from the Peterborough Family Health Team space at 185 King Street, supports patients in their first year as newcomers to Canada.
In a past interview with kawarthaNOW, clinic founder Dr. Madura Sundareswaran said that many refugees have a history of fragmented healthcare and typically arrive in Canada with little to no medical documentation.
Both Sprague and Dr. Sundareswaran said the Newcomer Health Clinic’s recent integration with the Connect Clinic has already begun the process of streamlining patient-provider attachment services.
In addition to expanding services at the Connect Clinic, the Peterborough Family Health Team will use the provincial funding in part to provide a designated nurse to Peterborough Street Medicine, a physician-led organization that provides care to unhoused and precariously housed individuals.
Peterborough Street Medicine offers services at locations such as Brock Mission, Cameron House, the YES Shelter, and the modular housing community on Wolfe Street, without requiring participants to enrol with a family physician.
Nurse practitioner-led clinic aims to attach 1,825 patients, and community health centre will hire two physicians to train medical students
As for the Peterborough 360 Degree Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic, it will receive $688,000 in provincial funding to enable the clinic to attach 1,825 new patients to nurse practitioner-led primary care.
“It’s a really ambitious target — it’s going to take a lot of dedication from my team,” said Danielle Howson, executive director and nurse practitioner lead at the Peterborough 360 Degree Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic. “But, as ambitious as it is, I’m really excited to see what we can do with that.”
To enable them to meet this goal, the clinic will add two nurse practitioners, retain one registered nurse following the closure of Peterborough’s Consumption and Treatment Site, and add two administrative support team members.
For Howson, this investment will better allow the Peterborough 360 Degree Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic to attach patients in a timely manner through collaboration with the Connect Clinic. She explained that the communication and transition support provided by the Peterborough Family Health Team allows patients to match with care teams that suit their needs.
As part of its ongoing work to recruit more physicians to the family medicine sector, the Peterborough Family Health Team is working in partnership with the Peterborough Community Health Centre to provide training for medical students.
The centre will receive $207,000 in funding to be enable the recruitment of two salaried family physicians who will provide direct training for students. This differs from the fee-per-service model that physicians engage with under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP).
Sprague explained that this funding model allows physicians to focus on education and training without concerns regarding the number of patients they see.
“A physician is not going to be able to clear off a lot of patients in the day when they’re training a medical student,” he pointed out.
Healthcare sector still facing challenges with recruitment and compensation
However, Sprague noted that the Peterborough Family Health Team does not only focus on recruiting new physicians, but also works with many retired family doctors who provide services on a part-time basis at the Connect Clinic.
“The funding is intended to help strengthen long-term healthcare capacity in the region and support the development of future healthcare providers through collaborative primary care initiatives,” a spokesperson for Peterborough Community Health Centre wrote in an email to kawarthaNOW.
While Sprague said he is grateful for the investment and identified MPP Smith as a strong partner in the application process, he recognizes there are still challenges faced across the family medicine sector.
“Family health teams used to be the employer of choice, but now we have a little more trouble filling positions than we used to,” he said.
Speaking to trends across the province, Sprague said that significant investment must be made to ensure that compensation for primary care clinicians is comparative and competitive across the healthcare sector.
Further to this, Sprague said that work must be done to make family medicine more appealing to medical students and graduates, saying that those leaving school in the current healthcare market are often looking elsewhere.
“I can’t help but think, if we start having med students come in and get exposed to family practice, more of them will choose that route, and more of them might choose Peterborough or Peterborough County,” he said.
