Advocates call for more nurse practitioner led clinics in Ontario

OTTAWA — The so-called triple threat of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19 has hit Ontario hard this fall and with long wait times at doctors’ offices and hospitals, the province’s nurse practitioners say they’re ready to do more to help.

Nurse practitioners are trained to diagnose, treat and monitor a range of health issues. They’re also able to make referrals to specialists and physicians.

Dana Cooper, the executive director of the Nurse Practitioners’ Association of Ontario, is urging Premier Doug Ford’s government to take better advantage those skills as people struggle to get access to primary care.

“Nurse practitioner-led clinics are the perfect solution to take in a lot of those unattached patients,” he said.

The first such clinic opened its doors in Sudbury, Ont. in 2007, and Cooper said 25 are now operating across the province.

He said his organization is receiving calls from communities including Thunder Bay, Prince Edward County and Ottawa about opening clinics of their own.

But he said access to government funding has been hard to come by.

“There is a great deal of talk in the ministry of health, recognizing the value of nurse practitioners and what they can contribute to health care. But we haven’t seen any firm plans to move forward with that,” said Cooper.

More than a million Ontarians do not have a family doctor, and the shortage of physicians is an issue across the country.

Bella Kravtzov, an Ottawa-based nurse practitioner, says with hospitals overrun and nurses leaving the field, the provincial government needs to provide more funding to allow her and her colleagues to offer robust care.

Unlike doctors, nurse practitioners are unable to bill Ontario’s provincial health insurance, or OHIP, for services. This means they rely more on direct provincial funding, which Kravtzov says creates additional difficulty.

She suggested that the federal government could have a role to play in “optimizing” the role of nurse practitioners within the system.

Kravtzov said that some of her colleagues have been trying to open a nurse practitioner-led clinic in Ottawa, but the process has been very long. The nearest such clinic is in Smiths Falls, Ont., about an hour’s drive away.

Leeann Langdon is the administrative lead at the Smiths Falls clinic. She said practitioners have seen increasing demand for their services over the last two years, and they treat patients with a variety of health issues from complex immune systems to everyday colds.

“The pandemic has really revealed a lot of different areas of care that people would benefit from having more health resources,” said Langdon.

Ontario’s ministry of health said in a written statement that it has already implemented a plan to allow internationally trained nurses to temporarily enter the field.

It also plans to spend $42.5 million, beginning in 2023, to expand undergraduate and postgraduate medical training.

The statement did not answer questions about whether there are plans to fund more nurse practitioner-led clinics.

“Increasing the number of doctors, nurses and personal support workers in Ontario is key to our government’s ‘Plan to Stay Open.’ The next phase of our plan will add up to 6,000 more health-care workers to Ontario’s health workforce,” the statement said.