Province commits to community health centre for Peterborough

The Ford government will fund a community health centre in Peterborough, health minister Sylvia Jones announced on Thursday, February 1, 2024.

Jones’ announcement comes after more than a year of advocacy from local health care leaders who were pushing the province for the funding.

Community health centres, or CHCs, are independent non-profits that are governed by a community board of directors. They provide primary health care services with a focus on serving highly marginalized patients who might not otherwise have access to care.

Jonathan Bennett, who chairs the newly formed CHC’s board of directors, called the announcement “fantastic news for Peterborough.”

“This is the first time a brand new community health centre has been funded anywhere in Ontario in over 15 years,” Bennett said.

CHCs got their start in Ontario in the 1960s and first received Ministry of Health funding in the 1970s, according to the Parkdale Queen West CHC. They were originally inspired by Medicare founder Tommy Douglas, who envisioned a health system that kept people healthy instead of only treating them when they got sick, according to the Alliance for Healthier Communities.

Ontario has dozens of CHCs operating in hundreds of communities. But there isn’t one in Peterborough, an absence advocates called “inexplicable” last year.

MPP Dave Smith agreed. “We’re the largest geographic area right now in Ontario that doesn’t have a CHC,” he said last year. “So obviously, there’s a need for it.”

Speaking at Thursday’s announcement, Peterborough Family Health Team CEO Duff Sprague said, “It’s no secret that family medicine and primary care are in crisis. It’s felt very deeply here in Peterborough.”

Sprague chaired the local working group that identified establishing a CHC as the number one priority for addressing barriers to primary care in Peterborough, he explained. He said he was “hopeful that today is going to be a very good day for Peterborough.”

Peterborough’s CHC funding was part of a larger province-wide announcement from Jones committing $110 million to connect more Ontarians to primary care. The money was awarded after communities were invited to submit proposals for new primary care initiatives early last year.

The province had originally earmarked $30 million per year for the new initiatives but increased that number to $110 million.

At least one other organization from Peterborough sought some of the new money. The local chapter of the Victorian Order of Nurses hoped to open a nurse practitioner-led clinic at the Peterborough Housing Corporation’s newest apartment building on Bonaccord Street and had submitted a funding application. 

But that application wasn’t successful. Smith said the CHC “is the only [local] project that we are announcing as part of today’s announcement.” He said there might be opportunities in the future for other local projects to apply for funding.

$3 million announcement falls short of requested funding, but MPP says more money is on the way

A November 2022 version of the Peterborough CHC working group’s proposal envisioned a centre staffed by 45.5 full-time equivalent health care professionals, including physicians, nurses, outreach workers, pharmacists, mental health workers, and more. 

Staffing the centre at that level would require an annual budget of $8.2 million, according to the proposal, and another $1.9 million would be needed for one-time startup expenses. At Thursday’s announcement, Sprague said the total requested was $8.6 million.

According to a press release accompanying the announcement, the health ministry is committing “more than $3 million” to “allow the newly established Peterborough Community Health Centre to connect up to 11,375 people to primary care.”

The CHC working group had previously estimated it could serve about 6,000 people if it received the full $8.2 million.

Bennett said he was “surprised and delighted” by the announcement, while acknowledging the announced money will fund “much less than what we asked for.”

But that could change. “I don’t know actually what the funding agreement is going to be,” he said. “We’ll wait to see the number and where it lands, and then what that number means.”

Bennet said over the coming weeks the CHC team will work with Ontario Health East to hammer out the details. “We’ll work with them around what they’re going to fund and how much,” he said.

MPP Dave Smith said more funding will materialize, just not right away. He told Currents that the startup of the centre will be done in stages and that “once it is fully up and running then we’re looking in the eight and a half million dollar per year range.”

Smith said he couldn’t predict how long it would take to ramp up the funding to the full amount. 

Bennett said that finding a space and recruiting health care professionals will be two of the first challenges the CHC will have to tackle. “Almost certainly it’d be located downtown,” he said.

And then there’s recruitment, which brings its own challenges. “We do have some physicians that have expressed early interest,” he said. “But this is their careers we’re talking about. We’ll be trying to convince them that they should make a leap of faith and take a full-time or part-time job with us.”

A focus on health equity

Peterborough’s medical officer of health Thomas Piggot said he is “really excited” by the prospect of a CHC in Peterborough. “Fingers crossed it’s as soon as possible because we continue to hear about the challenges people have without access to primary care.”

CHCs “help to support a more equity-oriented approach to primary care,” Piggott said. 

He said he hopes the centre “delivers on the focus for vulnerable [and] underserved populations,” including people experiencing homelessness, people with mental health challenges, and people who use substances. To do that, the space will have to be “safe, comforting, and welcoming” for people who might face barriers accessing other health services, he added.

Focusing on marginalized people is the plan, according to Bennett. “We will be serving vulnerable people,” he said. “That’s the primary goal.”

That means not everyone who lacks a family doctor in Peterborough will be served by the CHC, Bennett explained. “This isn’t going to be an open call for folks to get a new family doctor.”

Proponents of the CHC, including MPP Smith, have argued that the centre will have wider benefits on Peterborough’s health system overall. That’s because people who access the CHC are likely to do so instead of going to the hospital, thereby freeing up capacity at Peterborough’s emergency room.

Smith drew a sports analogy to communicate the significance of the funding announcement. “Effectively, we have just drafted Wayne Gretsky, Michael Jordan, and Tom Brady to be a part of our team,” he said.