Healthcare hardships

Our patchwork system no longer serves us. Let’s get behind Dr. Jane Philpott’s model for fixing healthcare in Kawartha Lakes and beyond

By Corey Norman

I was born and raised in Lindsay. I spent my formative years here before moving to large urban communities to do my undergraduate, post graduate and master’s degrees. When it came time to start my career and a family, I called Toronto home. But it wasn’t. Not really. And then my father got sick. At the time my wife and I were looking for a place to settle down and we took it as a signal. Along with our two young daughters we moved to Lindsay, in part so I could look after him in his last few months, and in part to give our daughters a place to call home. I am now the manager of business development at the Kawartha Lakes Community Futures Development Corporation (KLCFDC) and a member of the Launch Kawartha Team.

Kawartha Lakes isn’t the same place where I grew up. When I drive around the different communities, the growth is significant. And it is easy to forget just how vast this city really is. I was on a drive to visit a client in Minden, and it was nearly an hour of driving before I left the city limits. And the amount of development happening is eye opening. So, I know that my experience isn’t the same as every member of this community – it can’t be. I am 10 minutes from the hospital, my daughters’ school and daycare are within 10 minutes of my home, I can walk to get groceries or visit the bank, and I have history here.

Thankfully, we were able to get our two children into a local physician. My wife and I, however, have had to maintain our doctors in Toronto to continue receiving primary care. Nearly a third of the Kawartha Lakes community are without a primary care physician. And we don’t measure or track how far people must travel to see a physician – so long as you have one at all you are in a privileged position. That is our starting point. To many members of our community are and will have a similar experience is when it comes to accessing primary health care.

Now, layer in the 6500 homes that are planned to be built by 2031 that will bring more unattached people (those without a doctor) into Kawartha Lakes over the next 10 years. I won’t do the math but just say, the situation is going to get worse – a lot worse. Growth in population brings opportunity for more small businesses, which means more jobs and a better quality of life. Which brings more people, and so on. At least that is the hope. But, while we can build as many homes as we want, who will buy them knowing they won’t have access to a primary care physician once they move in? The real limit on our growth will be primary care physicians and daycare, yet another issue. So which situation is worse – one, we have a significant growth in population, but no one has a doctor, or two, we invest lots of time, energy and money to build lots of housing that no one buys, and still no one has a doctor?

However, it also isn’t that simple, and in fact it is a lot more complex. A real solution isn’t just numbers – getting 100 doctors to call Kawartha Lakes their home is neither realistic, nor optimal. How we utilize limited resources is as important as the amount of resources we have. That is why the recent appointment of Dr. Jane Philpott by Premier Doug Ford to lead the provinces “Primary Care Action Team”, to me, is opportune. Her vision for access to primary care physicians is both idealistic and realistic. On April 5, her article “It’s time for Canadians to have the right to a family doctor” was published in the Globe and Mail.

I have spent the last few months connecting and talking with individuals in our community about what can be done. While there seems to be alignment on the what needs to be done, the how has been far more difficult to pin down. Because, despite what seems like a very clear answer, the bureaucracy – and I don’t mean our municipal, provincial and federal representatives – create barriers to getting us all rowing in the same direction. Over many years we have created new committees, health teams, networks, not-for-profits and models in hopes of plugging a different hole in our ‘system.’ Each of those stakeholders either believes they are the solution or aren’t willing to admit they are not. In reality, there is no system. What exists is a hodgepodge of services delivered by entities within their own self-defined boundaries.

If we had the opportunity to design a real health system from scratch, how much of what we have would remain? Honest question. So, tabula rasa. How might we build a health care system where every citizen has access to a primary care physician? The bright side is this is no longer a problem where we need to think outside the box for solutions; Dr. Philpott has quite clearly laid out the guardrails on the box. Now we have to take the box and apply it in our context – what we do here by virtue of everything I have described makes what we do here look different than, say, Scarborough. So the problem is clear, the vision of a solution has been described, and the challenge is on us – this community – to make it real. We can help ourselves, or we can get in the way by continuing to cling to our pieces of the broken, piecemeal ‘system.’

It is time to gather a small group of interested parties, local health care experts, municipal representatives, medical recruitment experts, those representing business and job creation, and philanthropic interests, to embrace what Philpott’s model could look like in Kawartha Lakes. If you have interest in being involved in the conversation, or being part of the solution, please reach out at .