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Anne Bradley flips through the phone book in her Kingston, Ont., home, searching for clinics and hoping to find a new family doctor.
Bradley is a cancer survivor. When her doctor retired in 2017, she turned to the province’s centralized waitlist, Health Care Connect (HCC), to find a new primary care provider.
Two years later she was placed with a physician about 140 kilometres away in Kemptville, but when that doctor dropped half their roster a few months ago Bradley found herself back on the waitlist and losing faith in the system.
“I’m sort of getting cynical that all [the HCC] is accomplishing is to have patients just step back and have a false sense of security,” she said.
The HCC is supposed to be a centralized list of all Ontarians searching for a family doctor or nurse practitioner. When a spot at a nearby clinic opens up, the next registrant on the list is supposed to fill it.
In Ottawa and Kingston, however, clinics have been managing their own rosters, sometimes drawing hundreds of hopeful patients desperate to get their foot in the door.
“I find it baffling,” Bradley said. “Why go through that process of having people line up to get in when [the clinics] could just access the list?”
Lack of communication
For Bradley, it begs the question: What’s the purpose of HCC?
Jess Rogers, CEO of the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario, said the idea of a centralized list that all clinics draw patients from is feasible, but some clinics seem unaware of the process.
“It’s not intentionally fighting with one another. I think it’s really with the best of intentions that every community is trying to get people into care as quickly as possible,” Rogers told CBC.
She said better communication between the province and the primary care clinics would help.
“It’s a little bit messy right now, so you’ve got to kind of hang in there.”
According to the latest annual report from Ontario’s auditor general, however, the Ministry of Health has not updated its HCC communications plan since 2015.
Auditor General Shelley Spence found many Ontario Health Teams (OHTs) informed the ministry in December 2024 that they “do not support updating the existing legacy HCC tool as it is no longer fit for purpose.”
“These OHTs communicated that HCC was not widely supported by providers or accessed by Ontarians, and that, as an outdated system from 2009, it required redesign to integrate with OHTs,” according to her report.
HCC falling short, auditor says
Of the 178,000 registrants on the HCC waitlist in June 2025, more than 108,000 had been waiting for a primary care provider for longer than a year, the report found.
“HCC has not fully met the needs of Ontarians,” it concluded.
Moreover, “the Ministry of Health and Ontario Health did not consistently have processes in place to plan or oversee programs and initiatives to improve patients’ access to primary care providers.”
In a statement to CBC, a spokesperson for the Minister of Health said the HCC waitlist has been whittled down by 65 per cent this year, with plans to reduce it further by next spring.
“As the first step in our government’s $2.1 billion Primary Care Action Plan, we are working to connect every person on the HCC waitlist, as of Jan. 1, 2025, to primary care by spring 2026,” according to the statement.
In the Ottawa region, new and expanded primary care teams are expected to take on another 40,000 patients, the spokesperson wrote.
Filling the gaps
Provincewide, an estimated two million people were without a primary care provider as of 2024, according to INSPIRE-Primary Health Care, a network of primary care researchers and other stakeholders in Ontario.
In the meantime, a group of volunteers in Ottawa is working to more quickly match patients with primary care providers.
Each week, the volunteers search for open spots at clinics throughout the city. With 8,300 patients on their own rapidly growing list, there are many more people waiting than there are opportunities to place them.
“I wish that we weren’t in this position, but we are and it’s a community base that needs to fill that role where the information isn’t getting to citizens,” said volunteer Cynthia Boucher, who helps run a Facebook group called Ottawa Doctors Search.
“We just feel like it’s just something we have to do.”
