Ontario NDP leader delivers northern physician recruitment plan in Sault Ste. Marie

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath was in Sault Ste. Marie on Monday to introduce the NDP's plan to address medical shortages in the north.

Horwath said the NDP will introduce legislation next week to address chronic underfunding and staffing issues in northern Ontario, with a goal of hiring 300 more doctors across the north.

"The hospital is not just an entity in and of itself, it's part of a larger community," she told media Monday. "So as we were saying earlier, as people leave the Sault, that reduces viability of the community."

Horwath said the bill would also expand the number of seats and training opportunities at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

"Certainly we need to see more residencies as well that are opening up," she added.

"There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but the problem is, the puzzle has been sitting on the dining room table ignored over the last 15 years."

Getting enough family physicians has been difficult for northerners right across the board.

Natalee Martin, a Sault Ste. Marie mom, said she's retained her family doctor in Burlington, Ont., in the last 12 years because she can't afford to sit on a waiting list in Sault Ste. Marie.

"I have to take several days off work to visit my family doctor and it gets incredibly expensive," Martin said.

"It means that there's been plenty of times where I've gone to emergency for something as simple as having a bacterial infection in my throat, having to go to emergency just for them to say, yup that's an infection, here's a prescription for antibiotics."

Sault Ste. Marie's physician recruitment and retention committee said it's in need of about 10 family doctors currently and when specialists are included, that number jumps to around 25.