Getting a timely referral to a medical specialist now takes so long in Ontario that patients are reduced to scouring Facebook and WhatsApp groups to find where help is available, the association representing the province’s physicians says.
In a media briefing Monday, the Ontario Medical Association said that access to specialists has worsened, as patients with chronic conditions wait months to see a specialist while their family doctors resort to making multiple referrals in an attempt to cut through the delays.
“These delays have real consequences, and people are growing frustrated,” said OMA president Rebecca Hicks, a family physician.
She presented the results of a poll where one in five respondents reported waiting six months or longer to see a specialist, and another 8 per cent were still waiting for an appointment.
The Ipsos poll was conducted for the OMA and questioned 1,156 people between Oct. 13 and 19. It is considered accurate to within 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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About 14 per cent of respondents said their households considered seeking specialist care outside Canada.
The medical association called on the Ontario government to create a centralized referral program that would enable patients and doctors to be informed of the best options possible when seeking specialists, such as cardiologists, oncologists or orthopedic surgeons.
The OMA also said the province should expand its team-based model to include independent, community-based specialists, who often struggle with overhead, paperwork and staffing issues.
(Since 2024, Ontario has expanded access to primary care through a team-based approach that partners family doctors, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals to reduce administrative burdens and widen geographic coverage.)
The previous OMA president, Zainab Abdurrahman, is a pediatric allergy specialist based in Mississauga, but she told the media briefing that her patients come from as far away as Thunder Bay because they had trouble finding specialist care.
One family from Peterborough came to her because there was a year-long wait in their community to see a specialist for their child, who had a life-threatening allergy. They had heard of Dr. Abdurrahman’s availability through word of mouth and afterward told her that they would add her name to a Facebook page for Peterborough families seeking specialists.
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“Our patients and our physicians are using Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups to find community-based specialists to connect patients to care,” Dr. Abdurrahman said. “We need a centralized system that’s going to allow for patients to be able to, if they can go further, get faster care.”
Jane Purvis, a rheumatologist from Peterborough, said referrals are currently made in an ad-hoc, inefficient manner.
“The family physician or other specialist who wants to make a referral refers into a black box of unknowns,” she said at the briefing. “Nobody knows what the waiting lists are like. You might get referred to somebody whose waiting list is a year longer than a similar physician just down the street.”
As a result, physicians often send out four or five different referrals for the same patient for the same problem, “hoping that one of them will stick,” Dr. Purvis added.
Finding a specialist is particularly challenging for mental-health patients, who have trouble managing phone calls and e-mails.
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Tania Tajirian, chief health information officer at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, spoke at the briefing about a female patient living with schizophrenia who needed to see a cancer specialist. “Unfortunately her phone has been disconnected. After a few missed calls … no one in the system is responsible for following up, and her family doctor was never told.”
Questioned by reporters about the OMA’s concerns, Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones noted that the province already has a referral system for family doctors. “The next step, of course, is making sure that on the specialist side, we do the same thing.”
She would not say when a specialists’ referral system would be in place. “I’m not going to give you a timeline because it is something that physicians have to make the decision if they want to participate.”
Quebec doesn’t have a central referral system either, but there are dispatch centres in each health region, where requests for 26 main specialties are received, prioritized and directed to where service is available.
With files from Jeff Gray and Laura Stone