Family health teams urge Ontario to up pay for nurses, health workers to retain them

Ontario is working toward attaching everyone in the province to a primary care provider, but family health teams are warning that as the government has its sights set on that laudable goal, the foundation of primary care is crumbling.

Family health teams include not just doctors, but also a variety of other health professionals to provide comprehensive care, such as nurses, social workers and dietitians. The government funding for those professionals has not kept pace with inflation or with the wages the same professionals earn in other health-care settings, the family health teams say.

Nurse practitioners could make an additional $20,000 or more per year by working in a hospital, and physician assistants could make an extra $30,000, says the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario.

“We’re getting funding to bring on more people and attach more Ontarians, but if you don’t actually stabilize the workforce you have and stabilize the capital space that you have, you’re very limited in terms of being able to sustain attachment,” association CEO Jess Rogers said in an interview.

“So we might make our attachment numbers this year, let’s say, or by 2029, but the concern is, we want to make sure Ontarians have access to the care, not that they’re only attached.”

$430M ask to close structural wage gap

Family health teams received a 2.7 per cent compensation increase last year, but that followed multiple years of stagnation and does not come close to the level needed to properly recruit and retain professionals, the association says.

Various family health teams and their association made presentations to a legislative pre-budget committee, asking for $430 million over five years to close what they call a structural wage gap, and for $115 million in already committed workforce funding to be released.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the province is investing a lot in family health teams, including more than $600 million this year.

“Ontario is the first Canadian jurisdiction to pass legislation that establishes a framework for its publicly funded primary care system, and through our $2.1 billion Primary Care Action Plan, we are both investing more in family health teams across the province and connecting everyone to a primary care provider by 2029,” Ema Popovic wrote.

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Meghan Peters, executive director of a family health team in Sudbury, said some staff take on second jobs to make ends meet, though some could make tens of thousands of dollars more per year in different areas of the health sector.

“Passion for primary care is no longer enough to justify staying,” she told the pre-budget committee.

“And when these skilled professionals leave, the foundation of primary care weakens. Our ability to provide essential services, programs, timely access and comprehensive care is compromised. The ones that suffer most are our patients. As our health care professionals leave, our patients see longer wait times, reduced services, cancelled programs and face unattachment.”

Recruitment and retention across various areas of the health sector are a particular challenge for northern and rural Ontario, and family health teams say they are no exception.

Shannon Kristjanson, executive director of the Greenstone Family Health Team, told the committee they are funded for four nurse practitioners but only have one position filled.

“[At] the hospital, which is in the same parking lot as where we are — you can make around $40 an hour more as a nurse practitioner,” Kristjanson said.

“So it’s really difficult to recruit or retain almost all of the positions in health care in the north, but specifically nurse practitioners, just because of the pay difference.”