Ontario touts drop in number of residents lacking primary-care providers

More than 275,000 Ontarians were newly enrolled with a family doctor or nurse practitioner in the first nine months of last year, according to the province, but the government still has a long way to go to reach its goal of ensuring every resident has a primary-care provider by 2029.

The Ontario government announced Monday that the number of Ontarians without a regular health care provider has dipped to 1.98 million, down from the last widely shared estimate of 2.5 million as of 2023.

However, some of that reduction came from the Ontario Ministry of Health and the academic network that produces the estimates agreeing to align and refine the way they count people who are “unattached” – the health policy term for patients who don’t have a family doctor or nurse practitioner.