I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak to Bill 60, Your Health Act.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to our world-class health care workers for their skill, compassion and unwavering commitment to the people of Ontario.

This proposed legislation supports our goal to ensure that Ontario health care workers can provide high-quality, connected and convenient care now and into the future.

Since 2018, more than 60,000 new nurses have registered to join Ontario’s workforce, but we know there is more we can do to increase our nursing numbers further. That’s why we are expanding access to training for our nurses over the next two years by adding up to 500 registered practical nurses and 1,000 registered nurse training spots to help create faster access to primary care. We are investing up to $100 million to add an additional 2,000 nurses to the long-term-care sector by 2024-25.

I know, first-hand, there are unique health care challenges in small, rural and remote communities and that recruiting and retraining health care workers in these regions requires a dedicated approach. Last spring, we launched the Ontario Learn and Stay Grant to help these communities build their own health workforces. This program covers the cost of tuition, books and other direct educational costs for post-secondary students who enrol in high-priority programs in more than a dozen growing and underserved communities and commit to work in those communities after they graduate.

That’s why this year we are expanding the program, beginning in the spring of 2023, targeting approximately 2,500 eligible post-secondary students who enrol in high-priority programs, such as select nursing, paramedic and medical laboratory technology/medical laboratory science. This program focuses on building a stronger health care workforce in priority communities that have been challenged by staffing shortages. It will help to ensure every community in our province is stronger and has access to the care they need, when and where they need it.

We’re also growing the supply of nurse practitioners to facilitate faster access to primary care, long-term care and to add capacity in northern and rural areas. Along with this, we are adding 150 more education seats for nurse practitioners starting in 2023-24. This expansion will bring the total number of seats to 350 annually and will be an incredible investment for constituents in my riding and across northern Ontario.

The Your Health plan, which is supported by this bill, builds on the significant progress our government has made over the last several years. Since 2018, we have increased health care funding in our province by $14 billion. We have expanded Ontario’s health workforce with more doctors, nurses and personal support workers. We’ve added more than 3,500 hospital beds across Ontario, including acute, post-acute and critical care beds. We’re building new hospitals across the province, getting shovels in the ground for 50 new major hospital development projects.

Since 2021, we have provided funding to support operations of 49 new MRI machines. We’ve added nearly 60,000 new and upgraded long-term-care beds and investing nearly $5 billion over four years to hire more than 27,000 long-term-care staff, including nurses and personal support workers, increasing the amount of direct care residents receive.

Our government is better connecting health care organizations and providers in our communities through Ontario health teams. We know that to ensure you have faster and easier access to the care you need, we need to better connect you to care within your own community. Throughout the pandemic, Ontario health teams demonstrated the importance of health providers working together to care for patients. With their leadership, communities across the province were able to establish community COVID-19 testing sites, vaccination programs and other vital services.

Across the province, 54 Ontario health teams are working to improve transitions between health care providers and are ensuring a patient’s medical record follows them wherever they go for care. They’re also focused on embedding home care and primary care services so that you and your family can get care in your home or in your community.

Applications for four additional Ontario health teams are being reviewed. Once approved, these remaining teams will result in the province achieving its goal of full provincial coverage, ensuring everyone has the support of an Ontario health team. Working together, they will ensure that people can move between providers more easily, directly, connecting them to different types of care and providing 24/7 help in navigating the health care system.

We know that when people have health care available in their communities, they are more likely to seek and receive the treatment they need when they need it and stay healthier. Delivering convenient care to people in their communities will help keep our province healthier by diagnosing illnesses earlier, starting treatment as soon as possible and keeping emergency room wait times down when people need urgent care.

One of the key parts of ensuring the right care in the right place is expanding care at local pharmacies. Pharmacists in Ontario are highly trained, highly trusted and regulated health professionals. They are often the closest, most convenient option for health care in communities across Ontario. Throughout the last few years, pharmacists played a critical role in supporting patients across the province by supporting COVID-19 testing and vaccination efforts and educating patients about medication and treatment options. And we are expanding the role of pharmacists by increasing their scope of practice so that families will be able to connect to care closer to home at their local pharmacist, such as enabling them to prescribe medications for 13 common ailments. In the first month that this service was available to Ontarians, over 40,000 people visited their pharmacy for a prescription.

These initiatives are part of our ongoing work with front-line pharmacists, nurses and other regulated health workers to expand their scope of practice in ways that make it more convenient and faster for people to get care in their community.

Finally, we have heard loud and clear that you and your family want better and faster access to home care services. Last year, we dedicated over $1 billion to expand access to home care services over the next three years. This funding will benefit nearly 700,000 families who rely on home care annually by expanding home care services while recruiting and training more home care workers. It will help prevent unnecessary hospital and long-term-care admissions and shorten hospital stays. Most importantly, it will provide you and your family with a choice to stay in your home longer.

Speaker, our plan and this legislation will support our bold, innovative and creative vision to break with a status quo in our health care system that has stifled innovation and struggled to respond to growing challenges and changing needs. We’re making it easier and faster for people to connect to convenient care closer to home, including and especially the surgeries that they need to maintain a high quality of life.

Thank you again for this opportunity to speak to Bill 60 today.

Thank you for the question. Obviously, events such as the science fairs and going out into the communities, into the schools, to attract our young into these professions are going to have an everlasting effect on our communities. The ability to bring these students into a love of learning and a love of the health care system is going to go a long way to address the health care crisis that we’re facing and the shortages that we’re facing.

And let’s be clear: It’s not a shortage we’re just facing here in Ontario; it’s a crisis that’s being faced across the world. That’s why we have to come up with innovative new approaches to attract these students and these children coming out of post-secondary to get into the health care field, because we’re in competition in the world. If we don’t up our game and make sure that we’re making it more attractive and better for these students to want to stay and practice in Ontario, and in particular in the underserviced areas in northern communities, we’re failing our communities and we’re failing Ontario. So these are great opportunities for us to do that. Thank you.

Thank you for the question. Our government has launched the largest health care recruiting and training initiative in the province’s history. We’re building on the 12,000 new nurses registered to work in the province last year, and our government is investing in a range of initiatives to attract, train and retain more nurses and get them into the system sooner, including $342 million to add over 5,000 new and upscaled registered nurses and registered practical nurses, as well as 8,000 new personal support workers. On top of that, in October, our government announced we were breaking down registration barriers so more health care professionals trained in other provinces or internationally can practise in Ontario.

We are doing the work. We are outside the status quo. We are making the changes that are necessary in this era of time, not the 15 years of the previous government’s time, and we’re going to do what needs to be done.

Interjection.