Ontario's nurse practitioners say they need more funding to fill health-care gaps

While Ontario faces a shortage of doctors, there haven't been any open applications for new nurse practitioner-led clinics in the last few years.

That's according to Amanda Rainville, president of the Nurse Practitioners' Association of Ontario. She is also the executive director of the Capreol Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic in Greater Sudbury.

Nurse practitioners are trained and authorized to do many of the same duties that doctors do. They can write prescriptions for most medications, can order tests, including CT scans and MRIs, and can interpret the results from those tests.

The association says there are 25 nurse practitioner-led clinics in Ontario, and they are mainly in northern Ontario, and more rural parts of the province, where there are fewer doctors.

Rainville said her clinic has four nurse practitioners, and works with a team that includes a dietitian, social worker, nurse and a collaborating physician.

The clinic has 3,200 patients.

"We are at full capacity right now and we get an influx of intakes every week," Rainville said.

"So we would be able to expand and offer care to more patients if we had more funding."

Sudbury became the first community in Ontario to have a nurse practitioner-led clinic in 2007. The goal was to give more patients without a family doctor access to primary care.

Rainville said an investment in team-based health care is important as some estimates say 1.8 million Ontarians don't have a family doctor.

The Ontario College of Family Physicians says that if current trends continue, more than 3 million Ontarians could be without a family doctor by 2025.

Ontario's Your Health plan

Rainville said she hopes a health-care announcement the province made last week could translate into more investments for nurse practitioner-led clinics.

The province released the Your Health plan, which promises to provide "people with a better health care experience by connecting them to more convenient options closer to home while shortening wait times for key services across the province and growing the health care workforce for years to come."

In the plan, the Ontario government notes it invests nearly $46 million annually to support nurse practitioner-led clinics.

The plan also promises to add an additional 150 education seats to train new nurse practitioners, starting this year. That would increase the number of seats to 350 per year.

Long wait lists

Jennifer Clement manages three nurse practitioner-led clinics in Sudbury, and said patient satisfaction has been very high over the years.

Including her, Clement said the clinics have nine nurse practitioners who can each accept up to 800 patients.

"I think that's one of the greatest things about us is that we have team based care," Clement said.

Like the clinic in Capreol, Clement said her team works with other health-care workers like nurses, social workers and dietitians to provide patient care.

But Clement said the Sudbury clinics haven't received any funding to expand on their numbers.

"Unfortunately right now we do have a long wait list, so we have closed our wait list until we can get caught up, " she said.

Depending on the site, Clement said a prospective patient can wait six months to a year for an open spot.