Are Ontario’s waitlist incentives leading some doctors to drop current patients to take new ones?
- Canadian Healthcare Network
- 4 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The Physician Services Agreement, which came into effect last year, increases the financial incentive for doctors accepting patients from the province’s centralized waitlist from $350 to $500.
1/13/2026
Canadian Healthcare Network Staff
Ontario is giving family physicians money to take on new patients from the provincial waitlist. But is this incentivizing some doctors to drop their current patients in favour of taking on new ones?
In a story published on last week in the North Bay Nugget, a North Bay, Ont. woman told the newspaper that she and several of her family members received letters from her family doctor that they were being “de-rostered.”
But at work, the woman said one of her co-workers told her she had gotten a new family doctor through Health Care Connect (HCC), the province’s centralized waitlist for patients seeking a family doctor. It turned out that this new doctor was the same one who dropped the North Bay woman and her family as patients.
“The doctor who picked her up was the same doctor. This told me he was not reducing his patient load as my form letter had stated. How wrong is this to de-roster patients (and then) seek new patients? And why would a professional do this?” she said in the story.
It’s unclear from the story if this means that this woman and her family were completely dropped as patients by her doctor. Like much of the general public, the article appears to conflate the term “de-roster” with “drop”—even though de-rostering in Ontario means the patient-physician relationship has not ended and non-rostered patients are still eligible to access care on a fee-for-service basis rather than capitation.
The Physician Services Agreement, which came into effect last year, increases the financial incentive for doctors accepting patients from the HCC waitlist from $350 to $500. For established physicians who take on waitlisted patients outside of HCC, the new agreement also offers between $100 to $180, depending on factors such as the patent’s age and whether they live in a rural community.