TERRACE BAY — Using a river as a metaphor, one health care official told the province’s finance committee Queen’s Park should focus upstream.
Mary Lynn Dingwell, the executive director of the North Shore Family Health Team, presented to the legislature’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs when it stopped in Thunder Bay on Jan. 28. The MPPs were in the city for 2026 pre-budget consultations.
“Instead of pulling people out of the river downstream, (we need to be) preventing them from getting into the river upstream,” Dingwell told the committee hearing at the Best Western Plus Nor’Wester Hotel and Conference Centre. It included MPPs from the governing Progressive Conservatives, as well as the opposition NDP and Liberals.
“After over 30 years in healthcare, I still see most funds flowing to the downstream organizations.”
Those “downstream organizations,” she said, are hospitals, which generally have to treat people when they’re already sick. Her family health team is one of over 180 in Ontario and provides a range of services to Terrace Bay, Schreiber and Pays Plat First Nation with a focus on preventative medicine. Those health teams, she said, are “upstream.”
“We use our expertise and drive to keep people out of the river,” she told the committee.
Dingwell was joined by several other Northwestern Ontario family health team leaders, who attended virtually.
She told the legislative committee current funding levels for rural health teams make it difficult for them to competitively recruit, as other organizations, like hospitals, can pay better.
“For several years, when the family health team and the physician complement were full, we were able to offer a wide range of programs and services — including (same day) access appointments with the (nurse practitioner) or physician,” Dingwell said. “In the last five to six years, we’ve struggled to fill family health team and physician positions and can no longer offer access appointments with primary care practitioners.”
“This places extra strain on the physicians as people will go to the emergency department, which under (the rural funding model) is staffed by the same primary care physicians,” she continued.
“The role of the family health team differs in rural northern communities — we end up being the catch-all as community members look to us to provide the services that other organizations would provide in urban areas.”
The family health teams’ presentation called for more funding to be able to hire enough staff “needed to take care of the health needs of our communities,” and to close compensation gaps, a release of what the organization said is $115 million of already-committed workforce funding, changing how family health teams are funded to improve flexibility and so some money can be carried over to help with staff succession.
Speaking with reporters, Dingwell said better resourcing family health teams in the north can keep people out of hospital later.
“If the money were to flow more into family health teams, we can do preventative care,” she said. “We’re keeping people in their homes longer.”
“When you look at the alternative level of care, people in the hospitals, we can help support that by catching the disease earlier, by intervening in Alzheimer’s earlier and dementia and … just everything earlier.”
Dingwell told the committee her team on the North Shore was effectively short two physicians. Back in December, the health team posted an open letter to the communities to social media about the doctor shortage, saying “we understand how this shortage impacts your access to health care and the stress it can cause.”
The letter said physicians in the family health team’s communities provide primary care seeing patients in-office, as well as hospital, emergency and palliative care.
“Please know that we are actively working on solutions to improve the situation,” the letter said. “Our efforts include initiatives that aim to increase the number of health care professionals in our area, advocating for more resources and working on enhancing virtual services to provide more accessible options for care.”
Other family health teams in the Northwest, like Greenstone, told the government committee they’re short even more physicians, with the amalgamated Highway 11 community funded for seven, but only currently having three who are full time.
– With files from Jodi Lundmark
