Thousands of Chatham-Kent residents will soon have expanded access to primary care thanks to new provincial funding.
The Chatham-Kent Ontario Health Team (CKOHT) welcomed Chatham-Kent-Leamington MPP Trevor Jones on May 21, who announced 1.59 million from the Interprofessional Primary Care Team funding initiative to connect 3,288 additional residents to a family doctor or nurse practitioner through existing local Family Health Teams and Community Health Centres.
Care will be provided through interprofessional teams that include nurses, respiratory therapists, social workers, and dietitians, along wiht
Dr. Briana Yee-Providence, a family physician with the Chatham-Kent Family Health Team, said the collaborative, team-based approach ensures patients receive coordinated, holistic care.
“It allows me to give people who have that skillset, to be able to provide that care and support to my patients, so I can do the things that I need to do as a physician, [such as] making more complex medical decisions, [and] spending more time with patients,” she said.
Through a previous provincial investment in 2025, CKOHT was required to attach 2,900 residents to a family doctor or nurse practitioner. Denise Waddick, executive director of the Thamesview Family Health Team, said they were able to stretch the funding to connect more than 5,400 people to primary care.
“It just goes to show that this funding truly allows us to attach more patients than we’re expected to. So we can only imagine,” she said. “We’re probably going to reach closer to 5,000 or 6,000 patients when it’s all said and done by next May of 2027.”
Dr. Yee-Providence added that Chatham-Kent will need more than 20 additional family practitioners to meet the health care requirements of local residents.
“Unfortunately, here in Chatham-Kent and in a lot of southwestern Ontario, we have a lot of doctors above the age of 65, close to retirement age. So we know that we’re going to have significant challenges over the next five to ten years,” she said. “What we need to do is recruit, but we also need to support our doctors who are already here to help them be able to see as many patients and provide as much care as possible. Teams allow that to happen.”
There are currently 21,959 residents in the municipality who do not have a regular family physician or nurse practitioner, which is 16.6 per cent of Chatham-Kent’s population.
