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How The Grinch stole family medicine: A tale of Ontario’s health crisis

Writer's picture: Alykhan AbdullaAlykhan Abdulla

Updated: Jan 11

Dec 18, 2024 by Alykhan Abdulla


It began, not with a whisper, but a groan that echoed across my clinic and the community I serve.


Like a green, scheming miser, the Grinch of health care – festooned in a slew of government mismanagement and shortsighted policies – descended upon family medicine, stealing its spirit one policy at a time.


The Grinch didn’t just sneak into the stockings; he took the whole tree, leaving me and my colleagues scrambling for light in the darkness of a collapsing system.


“The problem is systemic,” I often tell anyone who will listen. It’s not rooted in the work ethic of physicians, but in a system designed to undermine us. It’s like plugging a leaky pipe with bubble gum. Sure, it’s colourful, but it’s not going to hold.


The Ontario government’s missteps are endless. Fee structures fail to reflect the complexity of modern family medicine, leaving me to choose between patient care and financial viability. Initiatives touted as solutions – like virtual care models – are implemented without adequate consultation, creating loopholes and inefficiencies. Why do we want purely virtual clinics without an actual family doctor to see, assess, examine, diagnose and counsel? Family Health Organizations (FHOs), once heralded as innovative, have become a tangled web of bureaucracy, limiting who can join and how close physicians are from one another, wrapping us in red tape tighter than a Christmas bow.


Oh, the red tape! It stacks and it spins, it tangles us up like a box full of pins. The forms and the filings, they never do stop, each twist and each turn makes our patience go pop!



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