New arrangement unveiled by the Ford administration, featuring elevated remuneration and enticements for doctors, who agree to expand their workload in family medicine.
The Ford government has announced a new four-year agreement with Ontario's doctors, aiming to address long-standing challenges in the province's primary care system. The agreement, which boosts physicians' compensation by 7.3% over the next three years, builds on a 10% increase awarded last year.
One of the key components of the agreement is the modernized payment structure, which aims to attract doctors to comprehensive family medicine and retain those who may be looking to leave the profession. The agreement updates the payment model for doctors working in a family health organization, the first such update in almost 20 years.
The revamped model is named FHO+, and it aims to reduce administrative burdens and reward time spent with complex patients. This model encourages more continuous care and is expected to make family practice a more attractive and sustainable career choice. However, the news release did not indicate whether the FHO+ model addresses the concern of lack of compensation for clinical administration that leads to burnout among family doctors.
The FHO+ model also allows for additional spaces for doctors to join family health organizations, which is the most widely adopted primary care model in Ontario. This could potentially help address the ongoing primary care crisis, which has left two million Ontarians without a family doctor. However, the new agreement does not seem to directly address this issue.
The four-year physician services agreement provides new funding for in-hospital anesthesia services and hospital on-call coverage to improve patients' access to hospital care. The agreement also includes historic investments in primary care, but no specific details about the extent of these investments were provided.
The name of the arbitrator who ordered the 10% increase for doctors the previous year was Dr. Ulrich Weyel. OMA president Dr. Zainab Abdurrahman stated that the arbitration award addresses long-standing challenges and marks a turning point for family medicine in Ontario.
Notably, the agreement revamps the model for doctors working in family health organizations, encouraging them to take on new patients and allowing doctors to bill for clinical and administrative tasks. This could potentially help alleviate the ongoing primary care crisis, although more details are needed to fully understand the impact of these changes.
The Ministry of Health did not mention any changes to the compensation for physicians in the news release. The ongoing primary care crisis has left two million Ontarians without a family doctor, and it remains to be seen how the new agreement will address this issue in the coming years.
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