Ontario – A year since the launch of Your Health: A Plan for Connected and Convenient Care, Ontario continues to make steady progress to provide people with the right care in the right place, faster access to services, supported by an expanded health care workforce.
Progress over the last year includes:
The Right Care in the Right Place
- More than 700,000 pharmacist assessments have been completed since allowing pharmacists to treat and prescribe for 19 common medical ailments, including pink eye, UTIs, and acne. Currently, more than 4,600 pharmacies, 94 per cent, are participating in the program.
- Health services and support can now be easily accessed 24/7 over the phone or online through Health811, with up to 90,000 people in Ontario accessing it monthly.
- The Ontario Structured Psychotherapy program has expanded significantly with now over 100 locations across the province helping over 75,000 clients.
- Achieving full provincial coverage of Ontario Health Teams, with all 58 approved teams across the province helping people transition seamlessly from one provider to another, with one patient record that follows them throughout their care journey.
- Eight new Youth Wellness Hubs opened across Ontario in the past year, bringing the total number of hubs to 22 with plans to open another five to make it faster and easier for young people to connect to mental health and substance use support, primary care and more.
Faster Access to Care
- Connecting over 13,200 Alternate Level of Care patients in the past year to the care they need in the comfort of a long-term care home instead of a hospital.
- Achieving the shortest surgical wait times of any province in Canada in 2023, with nearly 80 per cent of people receiving their procedure within clinically recommended target times.
- Eliminating the backlog of cervical cancer screening tests at the end of August 2023. Testing turnaround times returned to the pre-pandemic standard of 10 to 14 days.
- Completion rates of pediatric surgeries are reaching 112 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, as of December 2023.
- From April 1st to December 2023, close to 18,000 people conveniently completed their cataract surgery at community surgical and diagnostic centres, with almost 6,000 of those being preformed at newly opened centres.
- As of the end of 2022, 50 hospital development projects had been approved that will create more than 3,000 new hospital beds in communities across the province by 2032.
- As part of the plan to fix long-term care the government is investing $6.4 billion to build 58,000 new and upgraded beds.
- As of January 5, 2024, there are 18,204 new and redeveloped long-term care beds as part of 110 projects either completed, under construction, or that have ministry approval to start construction
- Investing nearly $10 million to help long-term care homes offer residents more diagnostic services on-site, instead of travelling to a hospital.
Hiring More Health Care Workers
- For a second year in a row, a record number of nurses have registered to work in Ontario with over 17,000 registrations in 2023 and another 30,000 nurses currently studying at Ontario colleges and universities. Since 2018, 80,000 nurses have been added to the health care system.
- Over 2,400 physicians joined the health care system, including almost 1,000 internationally educated physicians in 2022. Since 2018, more than 10,400 physicians have joined the health care system.
- Launched the largest medical school expansion in 15 years, including adding 106 medical school undergraduate training positions and 60 postgraduate positions, with over 75 more to be added in 2024.
- Ontario’s As of Right rules making it faster and easier for out-of-province physicians, nurses, medical laboratory technologists, and respiratory therapists registered in other provinces and territories to immediately start working in Ontario’s public hospitals and long-term care homes, without having to first register with one of Ontario’s health regulatory colleges.
- Launched the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant, with 3,700 students in eligible nursing, paramedic and medical laboratory technologist/sciences programs receiving up-front funding in the 2023/24 academic year for tuition, books and other direct educational costs.