Patients looking for doctors are losing confidence in Ontario’s centralized waiting list

Anne Bradley flips through the phone book in her Kingston, Ontario home, searching for clinics and hoping to find a new family doctor.

Bradley is a cancer survivor. When her doctor retired in 2017, she turned to the province’s centralized waiting list, Health Care Connect (HCC), to find a new primary care provider.

Two years later he was placed with a doctor in Kemptville, about 140 kilometers away, but when that doctor eliminated half his roster a few months ago, Bradley found himself back on the waiting list and lost faith in the system.

“I suspect that all (HCC) is doing is to push patients away and give them a false sense of security,” he said.

The HCC is supposed to be a centralized listing of all Ontarians looking for a family doctor or nurse practitioner. When a spot opens up at a nearby clinic, the next registrant on the list gets to fill it.

However, in Ottawa and Kingston, clinics are managing their own rosters, sometimes with hundreds of hopeful patients desperate to get their foot in the door.

“I find it shocking,” Bradley said. “Why go through the process of having to line people up to get in when (clinics) can just access the list?”

lack of communication

For Bradley, this begs the question: What is the purpose of HCC?

Jess Rogers, CEO of the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario, said the idea of ​​a centralized list from which all clinics draw patients is feasible, but some clinics are unfamiliar with the process.

“It’s not intentionally a fight with each other. I think it’s really with good intentions that every community is trying to get people into care as quickly as possible,” Rogers tools.D CBC.

He said better communication between the province and primary care clinics would help.

“It’s a little messy right now, so you’ll have to hang in there.”

according to The latest annual report of the Auditor General of OntarioHowever, the Ministry of Health has not updated its HCC communication plan since 2015.

Auditor General Shelley Spence found that several Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) informed the ministry in December 2024 that they “do not support updating the existing legacy HCC tool as it is no longer fit for purpose.”

According to their report, “These OHTs reported that the HCC was not widely supported by providers or accessed by Ontarians, and as an older system from 2009, it required redesign to integrate with the OHTs.”

Auditor says HCC is falling short

The report found that of the 178,000 registrants on the HCC waiting list in June 2025, more than 108,000 were waiting for a primary care provider for more than a year.

“The HCC has not fully met the needs of Ontarians,” it concluded.

Furthermore, “the Ministry of Health and the Ontario Ministry of Health did not have consistent processes for planning or monitoring programs and initiatives to improve patients’ access to primary care providers.”

In a statement to CBC, a spokesperson for the health minister said the HCC waiting list has been reduced by 65 per cent this year, with plans to further reduce it by next spring.

“As the first step in our government’s $2.1 billion Primary Care Action Plan, we are working to connect every person on the HCC waiting list by January 1, 2025, to primary care by spring 2026,” according to the statement.

In the Ottawa area, new and expanded primary care teams are expected to handle another 40,000 patients, the spokesperson wrote.

gap filling

According to INSPIRE-Primary Health Care, a network of primary care researchers and other stakeholders in Ontario, an estimated 2 million people across the province were without a primary care provider by 2024.

Meanwhile, a group of volunteers in Ottawa is working to match patients with primary care providers more quickly.

Each week, volunteers search for open spots in clinics throughout the city. With 8,300 patients on its rapidly growing list, there are many more people waiting than there are opportunities to accommodate them.

“I wish we weren’t in this situation, but we are and it’s a community foundation that needs to take on that role where information is not reaching citizens,” said Cynthia Boucher, a volunteer who helps run a Facebook group called Ottawa Doctors Search.

“We just feel like it’s just something we have to do.”