Ontario Liberal Leader Crombie promised to ease the burden on family doctors, and pledged to accelerate funding for local hospitals.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie visited Ottawa Monday with a pledge to add more family doctors to the province and reduce hospital wait times.
Speaking in front of an “End Hallway Medicine” banner, and flanked by the slate of Liberal candidates in that area, Crombie began by apologizing for the stark Liberal ad that depicts a patient on a gurney under thin blankets in a wintery hospital parking lot.
“Sorry about that ad,” she said. “I know it’s a punch in the gut but it is the stark reality of what’s happening in Ontario today.”
Some 2.5 million Ontario residents have no family doctor, she said, including 120,000 people in Ottawa. Emergency room wait times in the city are among the highest in the province and Crombie took aim at Premier Doug Ford for comments he made Sunday that too many people are clogging up ERs by going to hospital for minor ailments.
“Well Doug, I don’t know what choice they have,” she said. “They have no choice but to go to an ER. And it’s not their fault, Doug. It’s yours.”
Crombie promised a Liberal government would “expedite” construction of the new Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus, already underway, and planning for expansions of the Queensway Carleton and Bruyère hospitals.
She promised funding for new family health teams in Kanata-Stittsville, capital funding the Montfort Hospital and to “bring back a full-time 2SLGBTQ+ sexual and ‘hassle-free’ health clinic in Centretown.”
The Liberal platform also promised to educate and attract “thousands of new domestic and internationally trained family doctors,” to modernize family medicine practices, which are still tied to fax machines in many instances, and to end the current system of penalizing patients and doctors if people use walk-in clinics. The plan guarantees everyone a family doctor within four years.
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In introducing Crombie, Dr. Alykhan Abdulla, an assistant professor at uOttawa’s Department of Family Medicine who has practised for 30 years, outlined some of the problems family doctors in Ontario are facing. Chronic underfunding and a shortage of doctors means patients are waiting longer for care and coming with multiple medical and psychological issues.
For doctors, he said, it “creates a sense of overwhelming difficulty — of trauma — that you’re not able to look after people in a timely way in the way that you were trained.”
Family doctors are struggling to handle heavy patient loads during the day then are left with reams of paperwork to be done in the evening.
“Many of my colleagues are choosing not to do family medicine,” Abdulla said. “Many of my colleagues are choosing not to be doctors — after they are trained — because they are getting burnt out.”
With just days to go before the Feb. 27 election, polls show Liberal support rising but Ford’s Conservatives still ahead by nearly 20 points. Just 44 per cent of Ontarians voted in the 2022 election and turnout at advance polls this year has been low. Crombie was asked if she felt her message was getting through at a time when the news cycle is swamped with federal politics and the tumultuous effect of U.S. President Donald Trump.
She said Ford’s snap winter election call was cynical.
“Certainly there’s a lot going on, provincially, federally and in the world,” she said. “It’s very cynical. I can’t think of another premier of this province who would choose this moment, this month, to call an election campaign at a time when we need political stability, when they should be at their desk fighting for us and fighting for our jobs. Doug Ford is only concerned about his job.”
