Canadians need doctors. These strategies from around the country aim to find them
What ’s being done from coast to coast to coast to find solutions to the primary care crisis
The Cure is a CBC News series examining strategies provinces and territories are using to tackle the primary care crisis.
Kristen Walsh pores over the journal she uses to log everything she can about managing her multiple chronic medical conditions without a family doctor.
Walsh, who lives in Conception Bay South, N.L., just outside St. John's, has ankylosing spondylitis, a rare type of arthritis, as well as polycystic kidney disease and ADHD.
She sees specialists for her kidney disease and arthritis, and sometimes visits nurse practitioners to help manage her conditions. But she says a family doctor would help see the whole picture.
"Because while everyone's kind of looking at their own individual piece of the puzzle, no one is putting all the pieces together to say, like, you're this person as a whole and these are all of your conditions and these are all the medications you're on."
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Walsh is one of an estimated 6.5 million Canadians left navigating a strained health-care system by themselves, as the country's family doctor shortage reaches a crisis point. According to a 2025 Health Canada report analyzing the health-care workforce, the country is currently short 22,823 family physicians.
"That to me is a jaw-dropping number," said Dr. Joss Reimer, president of the Canadian Medical Association.
"We need to be doing everything that we can to increase those numbers of family physicians, but also trying to find other solutions."
There are strategies in place in every province and territory to find a remedy to the problem, from pumping cash into new physician payment models to opening new med schools and expanding scopes of practice for other health-care professionals.
A new pay model
A key strategy on the West Coast, where British Columbia estimates it needs 4,400 family physicians, is a new payment model.
The province introduced the longitudinal family practice model in February 2023, which changed how — and how much — family doctors were paid.
On average, the province says the model would boost a family physician's salary to $385,000 a year, up from roughly $250,000.
Dr. Rita McCracken, who's been practising family medicine for more than 16 years, says she's noticed an increase in her income since the model was introduced.
"So we now have an hourly pay that we get for both direct patient care and indirect patient care," said McCracken, also an assistant professor in the department of family practice at University of British Columbia. "And then we still get a per visit fee."
Unlike the traditional fee-for-service system, this model blends a salary-like payment structure with compensation based on time spent with patients and the complexity of cases, according to the B.C. health department.
It says that just over 1,000 new physicians are practising longitudinal care since the model launched.
Though not all the data is in yet, McCracken says early indicators show a positive impact.
More medical professionals
McCracken says the health-care system needs to make more fundamental changes by focusing on the number of team-based clinics in each province, not just the number of doctors.
She says the system should also employ different medical professionals, such as Licensed Practical Nurses or medical assistants to triage patients before they see a doctor, which she says would be an "amazing booster for capacity."
Across the country, regulators are working to expand the scope of practice for other health-care professionals, like nurse practitioners, pharmacists, paramedics and more.
Saskatchewan started allowing the licensing of physician assistants in 2023.
Just this month, 90 top applicants — from an initial field of 340 — were interviewed as part of the application process for the new Master of Physician Assistant Studies Program at the University of Saskatchewan.
Ultimately, just 20 applicants will be accepted, and Dr. Trustin Domes, the program's academic director, says they'll help take the load off doctors.
"It basically brings more players on the team and players that are there to help with the patient care, but also to help with the physician workloads," said Domes, noting that the assistants don't work without the supervision of their physician or physician group.
Right now, he says the priority is establishing a manageable, quality program, while expansion will come later.
Team care a priority across Canada
In Ontario, approximately 2.5 million residents were without a family doctor as of June last year, according to INSPIRE-PHC, a health research network in the province. That's why the province is focusing on reshaping who delivers the care.
In January, Ontario's Progressive Conservative government announced $1.4 billion for an "action plan" with the aim to fund hundreds of primary care teams within the next four years.
Team-based care features in the health-care planks of all major parties in the upcoming provincial election.
Back in 2005, the province introduced interdisciplinary teams of health-care workers who can provide primary care. These teams include not just family physicians, but registered nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers and dietitians, among others.
Dr. Dominik Nowak, president of the Ontario Medical Association and a family doctor himself, says bolstering team-based care is among their top strategies to tackle the primary care crisis.
"When I meet folks who haven't had a family doctor, I think of one person that I ran into a few months ago who hadn't had a family doctor in six years," Nowak said.
The result, he says, is that unattached patients can end up "bouncing" between ERs and walk-in clinics and sometimes end up with delayed diagnosis for serious illnesses, such as cancer.
"That's the reality for too many people who can't find that foundational level of care that everybody in Canada should expect."
According to a report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information in 2024, one in seven emergency room visits could be avoided if patients had timely access to primary care.
Doors wide open
Meanwhile, one East Coast province is experimenting with what the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia calls a "one of a kind" approach to streamlining the licensing of internationally trained physicians.
With provincial backing, the college has opened a new Physician Assessment Centre of Excellence (PACE) clinic this month. It will centralize the assessment of qualified doctors trained abroad. The plan is to shrink the typical 18 months it takes to licence internationally trained doctors to as little as 12 weeks.
About a third of family doctors in Canada are trained abroad, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
"We want to open the door as wide as possible to as many candidates as possible, without lowering the bar of the necessary competencies required to be demonstrated," said Dr. Gus Grant, registrar and CEO of the college.
Grant says that previously, licensing decisions in Canada were rooted in exams administered by the Medical Council of Canada or other regulators before supervisors could assess them in practice. The exams were the same ones students fresh out of med school would face.
The PACE program, he says, drops the exam, is a better evaluation of the abilities of doctors who have been practicing for years and is still done in partnership with the council.
"What we're trying to do here is to develop a better, quicker, reliable, safe way to identify competent physicians," said Grant.
According to the college, when the PACE clinic is fully operational, it could add 40 doctors to the province's health-care system each year.
About 110,000 people in Nova Scotia don't have access to a family practice, and family physician Dr. Andria MacAulay says the new clinic will be key to increasing access to primary care.
"There is not a day that goes by that my admin staff don't get a phone call with someone asking 'Can you take on my husband? Can you take on my child? Can you take on my cousin,' " said MacAulay, who has recently trained to become a physician assessor at the clinic.
Because the clinic requires doctors to treat patients in order to demonstrate their competencies, some patients who don't have a family doctor will get access to care.
"I hope that the work being done in Nova Scotia can be replicated other places," MacAuley said.
Putting down roots
Yukon government data shows there are approximately 4,000 residents in Whitehorse alone waiting for a family doctor or nurse practitioner.
Add a population surge of roughly 5,000 people over the past four years and a 2024 Yukon Medical Association member survey that found about 40 per cent of family physicians plan to close in the next five years — and the need is apparent.
Dr. Derek Bryant, who is the head of the association, says research shows the majority of people who finish their residencies tend to stay where they've trained. That's why they're looking to establish a new, homegrown residency program to allow young doctors to put down roots while they finish their training.
"The hope is that we would have the ability to train family doctors locally here, because currently there is no option to do that," Bryant said.
The program is still in the planning stages, and the Yukon Department of Health says the earliest it could be launched is July 2027.
Yukon isn't the only region looking at their education and training programs. New medical schools are opening in B.C., Ontario, while other provinces are adding seats to existing programs.
Tingting Zhang, a junior policy analyst with the C.D. Howe Institute, researches the family doctor shortage across the country and compares how each jurisdiction is pursuing solutions.
"We see some positive results, but we also see that the care gap is still there, especially as our population grows," she said.
For Kristen Walsh, in Conception Bay South, closing that gap with her own family doctor would relieve some of her stress.
"It would be someone kind of coming down to your level and saying, like, 'I'm here for you.' "
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