A Primary Care Action Plan to attract and retain family doctors and nurse practitioners
02/10/2025
Across Canada, 6.5 million people don’t have a primary care provider. In Ottawa, over 165,000 residents were without one in 2022. That number continues to rise. Health care isn't a municipal responsibility. But there's nothing more important than the health our residents. That’s exactly why we need to do everything possible to attract more family doctors and nurse practitioners to Ottawa.
We've come up with 10 recommendations to attract family doctors to work in Ottawa. Here are a few of them:
• Using existing budgets, we're going to appoint a new Primary Care Ambassador for the city and launch a two-year pilot project.
• We're going to launch a recruitment strategy to bring more doctors and nurse practitioners here.
• And we are going to push the Province to remove rules that make recruitment harder, like limits on where family doctors can practice, which really affects our rural villages.
• We will look at ways the City can provide land or space to help create or expand non-profit medical centres in areas that need them most.
