A historic win for primary care in Ontario with Peter MacLeod
In this special episode, host Dr. Tara Kiran reflects on the passage of Ontario’s new Primary Care Act—the first legislation of its kind in Canada. Joined by Peter MacLeod, founder of MASS LBP and co-lead of the OurCare initiative, Tara and Peter take you behind the scenes of a national public dialogue that helped shape the new law. Nearly 10,000 Canadians participated in the OurCare process and what they said they wanted from the primary care system is now reflected in Ontario’s legislation. This episode is a story of civic imagination, moral beauty—and a hopeful step toward primary care that works for everyone.
Resources mentioned in the episode:
Read more about OurCare and OurCare Standard: OurCare.ca
Meet some of the OurCare panelists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShkxhIJBCh8&t=25s
Review Ontario’s Primary Care Act: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/s25008
Watch the press conference where Ontario’s Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, announces the Primary Care Act: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFYZOosIZng
Related articles you might like:
Results from the OurCare provincial priority panels
Dr. Tara Kiran’s Opinion piece in the Toronto Star
More about Primary Focus:
Subscribe to our Substack newsletter
Have an idea for an episode? Email primary.focus@unityhealth.to
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A historic win for primary care in Ontario with Peter MacLeod
Primary Focus Podcast
Pre-Show: Sharing the News
Dr. Tara Kiran (00:06) Hey Peter.
Peter McLeod Tara, how's it going?
Dr. Tara Kiran It's going really well. I'm really excited to share some news with you.
Peter McLeod Well, there's been a lot of good news lately. Give me some more.
Dr. Tara Kiran The Primary Care Act has been legislated in Ontario. The bill passed. It received Royal Assent today.
Peter McLeod Whoa. That is the real deal.
Dr. Tara Kiran Yeah. We helped get us to this place, and I can't wait to talk to you more about it.
Peter McLeod Sounds good.
Introduction
Dr. Tara Kiran Welcome to Primary Focus. I'm Dr. Tara Kiran, and we're here to imagine a primary care system that works for everyone. Today we're marking a historic milestone.
[Clip from announcement:]
Minister Sylvia Jones Now it's my pleasure to welcome to the podium the Deputy Premier and Minister of Health, the Honourable Sylvia Jones.
Today, I am pleased to announce our government is taking a major step forward in our plan to protect our health care system and connect everyone in Ontario to a family doctor and a primary care team. Later today, I will be introducing the Primary Care Act, which, if passed, will make Ontario the first Canadian jurisdiction to establish a framework for the province's publicly funded primary care system.
Dr. Tara Kiran Ontario's new Primary Care Act officially became law in early June 2025. It's a historic moment that so many of us have been pushing for for a very long time — one that didn't happen by accident, but rather as a result of years of thoughtful research and advocacy by so many, and ultimately a commitment to truly listening to the people who the system should be designed to serve: patients and the public.
The new act actually reflects what we call the Our Care standard — a standard that came from an initiative that I co-led with Peter McLeod. That initiative, Our Care, or Nos Soins, is the largest-ever public dialogue about the future of primary care in Canada. Over sixteen months, we heard from nearly 10,000 people across Canada who collectively spent about 10,000 hours with us — telling us about their experiences with primary care, but even more importantly, what they wanted and needed from a better primary care system.
We conducted a national survey, five provincial priority panels, and finally ten community roundtables. And then we distilled all that we heard into the Our Care standard: six statements that describe what every person should expect from the primary care system in Canada. Primary care delivered by a publicly funded team, with integrated community services; care that's both timely and ongoing; care that's culturally safe and accountable to the communities it serves; and care where people are empowered and have access to their own health data.
Those six standards are now reflected concept-for-concept in Ontario's new Primary Care Act.
[Clip from announcement:]
Minister Sylvia Jones So the people in Ontario know what they can expect when accessing primary care services, no matter where they live. This legislation sets out six objectives to Ontario's primary care system, which will help improve access to primary care and empower people with the knowledge and tools to increase their well-being.
Dr. Tara Kiran I want to tell you a little bit about how Our Care came to be. And to do that, I need to introduce you to Peter McLeod. Peter is the founder and principal of Mass LBP — one of Canada's leading experts in public engagement and deliberative democracy.
Here's Peter describing how Mass LBP came to be.
Peter McLeod I'd created Mass following Ontario's — already now quite forgotten — Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, which was an enormous and unlikely process that the McGuinty government embarked on, to invite Ontarians to basically form a giant jury and think about whether we should change the voting system. I got involved and got to watch the thing unfold, and it convinced me that there's probably a better way of working with people when it comes to developing public policy and addressing their concerns. Because so often we have this caricature in our minds of the town hall meeting — usually people sounding off and giving their piece of mind — and the reason they do that is because they feel quite rightfully frustrated. We talk a lot about public engagement, but I'm not sure that we've actually come up with ways to effectively and adequately listen to people.
So that's probably a little bit of what I was talking about when we first met: the idea that people are a resource, not a risk.
Dr. Tara Kiran I'd seen Peter speak a few times, and the unique approach his team at Mass LBP was taking to encourage citizen engagement and shape policy was pretty inspiring. It also made me curious about how we could apply that model to help shape policy in primary care. That curiosity quickly turned into collaboration — starting with a small patient engagement day at my own family health team back in 2016, and then ultimately with the launch of Our Care. And so today I'm thrilled to welcome Peter McLeod to Primary Focus.
We're talking about that early collaboration, what we've learned from Our Care, and why this moment — the passage of the Primary Care Act in Ontario — is not just an ending, but a beginning. Let's get into it.
Conversation with Peter McLeod
The Name: "Our Care"
Peter McLeod Why don't we start with the name? It came, in my own mind, out of one of my abiding frustrations with how in the health system we conventionally try to consult with people. Having walked in and out of many hospitals on different projects over the years, almost inevitably you'd run into a very well-intentioned sign that would say something like "Your Hospital" — "Come tell us what you want and you need and you think." This is part of a 30-year cycle around thinking about public services in increasingly commercial terms, and thinking about citizens as customers — that the job of public services is to deliver what they want. So when we want to ask people what they need, we say, well, this is your thing.
"Our Care," I thought, was a more accurate reflection, because it's a collective enterprise. Words matter, and we need to take that as our ethos. And I think it infused all of the design choices we made. I'm not part of the school of thought that says we just need to put the people in charge and that this should be citizen-led. What we created was a dialogue between experts and citizens — some of which happened in the room, some of which was through what I think was a really respectful and enriching interpretive role. I think we were able to produce a body of data that very quickly became useful to others. And because we pushed it into the public domain, it had a multiplier effect.
Phase One: The National Survey
Dr. Tara Kiran The first phase of Our Care was this national survey. We had just over 9,000 respondents, which is pretty amazing. It was a wonderful collaboration with [uncertain: Fox Pop Labs]. For me, the survey helped serve as a touch point — just to understand overall what is happening, get a gestalt. What is people's experience like? What are the values that are really ringing true? Of course, you can't really go into depth in a survey, but you can get a superficial understanding. At the same time, it was an important understanding, because I think one of the most critical things that came out of the survey was just the sheer number of people who are struggling to get primary care. Basically, we found that 22% said they didn't have access to a family doctor or nurse practitioner. We translated that to the adult population of Canada, and that's more than six and a half million people. And now you hear that stat everywhere.
But it was actually thanks to the Our Care survey that that statistic really came into the zeitgeist. And I think the survey also helped illustrate how much regional difference there was in that. We put all the data out there for people to play with, which helped make this process democratic — we didn't just keep the data for ourselves, we tried to make it public so anyone could use it and explore it.
Phase Two: The Provincial Priority Panels
Peter McLeod Lots of people do surveys. But I do think what made Our Care special were the dialogues. And I think that's where you and your team really shine — supporting ordinary people to come together to solve complex problems. And there is no more complex problem than trying to get everybody in the country good primary care. Would you mind just describing the process for our priority panels?
Dr. Tara Kiran We did these five citizen reference panels, one in each of five provinces: British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. As you often talk about it, Peter, they were opportunities to really try and bring the province into a room to have a discussion. And I think that's really special.
Peter McLeod This is it. In each of these sessions — that lasted a few days — we weren't asking people to come give us two hours on a Wednesday evening. We were asking people to put their lives on hold to come and do something consequential. So we often ask people for their feedback, we ask them for their input. We don't ask them to help us solve a problem. And this is a really wicked problem: what should Canadians be able to expect from their primary care system?
Most people too never have the opportunity to meet with people from very different parts of their community. The fact that we invited people to volunteer for this exercise is playing to some powerful cultural tropes: people are too busy, they're too self-interested, they're too ill-informed to possibly volunteer and give us three days of their time. And yet we had thousands upon thousands of people who put their names forward, willing to give us three days, come to a provincial capital, and work on the health system.
It actually gives people a chance to step a little bit beyond themselves and think about the greater public good. And that's what we saw come forward, again and again, in the Our Care priority panels — people articulated things that addressed what they perceived as the real social deficits in our society.
Dr. Tara Kiran When I reflect on the priority panel, it is amazing that there was such diversity in terms of who participated, and that they were all strangers to each other. These are thirty-six randomly selected people from the province who volunteered and said, "Yeah, I want to spend thirty to forty hours with other strangers designing a better primary care system." But what was amazing is that, despite the diversity and being strangers to each other, they came together and listened so respectfully — really listened. It wasn't just hearing, but digesting and taking in what their neighbours experienced, what values their seatmate or tablemate might have, pulling it all together over the time they were discussing, and then coming up with recommendations they all stood behind. Consensus-based recommendations that pretty much everyone agreed on, despite us living in what we often think about as a time of intense polarization.
When I was at these priority panels and heard the panelists deliver their recommendations orally at the end, it brought tears to my eyes. And I saw other people tearing up in the audience too, because it's so beautiful to see people come together in this way with such purpose. After watching this unfold a few times, I came to the term "moral beauty" — because I think that is actually what this is about. Moral beauty inspires a sense of awe. And I felt just really grateful to be able to be in the room and felt so hopeful about our future as a society and about humanity.
Peter McLeod To connect this: what we heard the members of these primary care panels express was a moral ambition for how we care for each other in a society. And that very quickly supersedes any more superficial sense of polarization.
To think a little bit about what is going on for the individuals in the room — we do need to be concerned about polarization. We do need to be concerned about declining trust and confidence in public institutions. For a long time, we've talked about remedies like civic literacy — if just more people knew how the system works, how a bill becomes law, then maybe things would be better. But I think that's necessary but not at all sufficient.
What we see going on in these panels is what you might call democratic fitness. People develop an expanded sense of their own agency and voice, of their own personal skills, and then the group's collective efficacy. And they are learning how to disagree agreeably — which is, I guess, a key skill for democratic citizenship. It's a fact of life: you don't always get what you want, and you still have to believe in the system and believe that it's right and fair and appropriate. And we don't have chances to practice those skills of interacting with each other.
I was obviously powerfully influenced by that original Citizens' Assembly that I mentioned. Many people left that year-long process feeling utterly transformed — people who had been out of the job market getting back in, people changing jobs, people getting into politics, getting into their local communities. People who hadn't finished high school feeling as though they'd finally graduated — they had an enormous sense of their own self-worth and capability.
And I can assure you that nobody in the premier's office who set the whole ball into motion thought that a discussion about something as opaque as electoral reform could pay a democratic dividend to all of those people. We don't expect that people interacting with the health system — with their local GP's office, with the ER, with a clinic — should pay a democratic dividend. And yet it is part of our collective health as a society.
So when people are in the back of the room hearing the recommendations and feeling inspired, it's not because something magical has happened. It's because something rare has happened — and it's something entirely replicable. And we ought to make it a more frequent part of our institutional life and our civic life.
Dr. Tara Kiran I love that term — "democratic dividend." I think it fits what I heard from people who were part of the process: they felt really grateful for the opportunity to contribute, but also to learn. And that's another aspect of the priority panel that was important — we gave people hours of curriculum, basically on primary care, thanks to the generosity of so many colleagues across the country who gave talks or panels to the participants. And they left feeling really grateful that they received that education. In fact, a key recommendation from every panel was for more people to be able to have that same education — they wanted everybody to have it.
Peter McLeod Let me just pick up on that — the dynamic of participants feeling enriched, but also our guest experts feeling enriched. This is the flip side of that resource dynamic. So if we say people are a resource, we could still be totally extractive — "Come in, tell us all your thoughts, thanks, goodbye." But we know that actually good resource management is reciprocal. The relationship we're creating has to be reciprocal. And so when I say thinking about the public as a resource, it's not just to tap and drain them — it's in fact to create something that's replenishing. It's nurturing, like a garden. And then it's healing, like there's something alive.
Phase Three: Community Roundtables
Peter McLeod Let's also just talk about performance. At the end of the day, you and I are really excited about the Primary Care Act in Ontario. And I think we both genuinely believe it's a really key step toward a much larger transformation. Hundreds of thousands of people need to find their way into the primary care system over the course of the next twenty-four to thirty-six months. We can have all the moral ambition and all the aspirations in the world, and if we don't use them to push forward and deliver at scale, then it's a kind of betrayal. We were very explicit about everything: we're not the doers in this, but we're going to make sure your ideas get the best possible hearing.
And in Ontario, they found an incredibly receptive champion in Jane Philpott, who had gone in to drive forward this agenda. But organizing a clear public vision has to, of course, be connected to the realization of those ambitions in the performance and accessibility of public services. It's not enough to just talk. There also needs to be some action.
Dr. Tara Kiran That's it. That's it. Okay, so but before we get to the Primary Care Act, I do want to make sure we don't skim over the third phase of Our Care. We've talked about our survey and the priority panels — but I also think what made Our Care special is the third phase. It was really important for me, as we moved forward, that we ensured we were getting the voices of the most marginalized in this process, because we know too often they're actually missing when we do these kinds of dialogues and engagements.
With the priority panels, what was incredible was to watch your team really try to meet people's needs so that a whole range of people could participate — from having a support person there, to obviously ensuring accessibility from a physical and sensory perspective, to making sure someone had the right chair if they had back pain. Just so much attention to those details to ensure everybody could participate.
Yet we knew that still, participating required spending thirty to forty hours — and that might limit who was able to engage. And so you helped come up with this idea, Peter, of these community roundtables. At the end of the day, they were actually really hard to action, because they rested on partnerships with community organizations serving marginalized members of the public. And we know those community organizations are often so stretched they themselves don't have the resources to do anything more than what they're doing — they're putting everything they can into supporting these marginalized communities.
But we were still able to find, after lots and lots of outreach, ten amazing organizations that partnered with us and brought members of these marginalized communities together — communities we wouldn't have been able to recruit on our own because we didn't have the trust and the relationships. But they brought them together for a one-day dialogue that we were able to co-conduct, sometimes in three to five languages. I was part of one of those — I think it was three languages simultaneously, the one I attended. And it's pretty incredible to watch.
Another one I remember that was very distinctive was in Montreal. The community organization set itself the challenge that each of the twenty-four people at the roundtable would have an immigration origin from a different country in the world. And they managed to pull that off. That says a lot about Canada and also about that organization.
Peter McLeod Just something you mentioned there about the attention to detail and making sure members of the priority panels got a different chair if they needed one — that says something about how we think about serving the public. When I'm working with a group of randomly selected citizens, I'm thinking about them as though they were each members of the board of the most prominent hospital. There's no doubt that if a hospital CEO knew that one of the board members had a bad back, they would get a decent chair. Someone is definitely thinking about the nice lunch, the well-paced agenda, and the quality of all the materials.
What we're really trying to do is just extend to them the same standard that we would extend to anybody of any status attempting to do something consequential and serious.
Dr. Tara Kiran I have to interrupt here just to highlight that you had something called a Civic Concierge. For each panel, there was the Civic Concierge — a person people could call if they had any issue, at any time.
Peter McLeod Yes — like a high-end hotel where you go to the concierge and they have time for every question. There's no such thing as going to the wrong door with us. It is our pleasure to serve.
You know, the point about the community roundtables is really vital. In your listeners' minds, I want them to be thinking about really four sources of expertise. And of course there's all the background research and literature — the academic context and policy context in which we're operating. But we had the expertise of all of the clinicians and health researchers. We had the expertise that came from the survey. We had the expertise that came from these demographically representative groups. But the challenge — which I'm sure your listeners picked up on — is that the concerns of the dominant public can too easily overshadow and may do violence to the needs of smaller and underrepresented communities. And that's why I can be at once passionate about the importance of thinking about the broader social contract, but ensuring that it doesn't come at the expense of what we've called minority voices in this country.
So we need to hold these things in conversation with one another. And the only way to do that was to create dedicated platforms for those communities.
The Our Care Standard and the Primary Care Act
Dr. Tara Kiran I want to spend the last few minutes we have together talking about something else. We've talked about where Our Care came from, what we did, and what was really special about that process. We put out a total of seventeen reports. But one of the things you did so well, Peter, was force us to say: we need something that simplifies all of this, everything we heard, so that it's really clear what it is that people want. You forced us to come to this concept of the Our Care standard — to really distill what it is we heard from all of our engagements. And so the Our Care standard became these six simple statements that summarized what we heard from across all of our engagements, but also summarized where the health system should go and what people should expect from our primary care system.
And that standard now is really the backbone for the Primary Care Act. Which is amazing.
Peter McLeod This is it. Canada is a big country — one of the things that is never going to hopefully change about this place. Rhetorically, when we want to say we're doing something special and very Canadian, we call it the Great Canadian pancake breakfast, or the Great Canadian race. Even though we are a comparably small population, we have this vast landmass. And so in the Canadian psyche, when we're going to do something important, it means we have to do something big. The bigness of those seventeen reports was, I think, an important signal to people that this could credibly claim to be comprehensive — that we had tried to look at this forwards and back, from so many different perspectives, carrying and enriching so many relationships. And that we weren't doing it because we had a private agenda to advance. This was an attempt to take the pulse of this big, complicated country and convert it into something that governments and policymakers would feel compelled to use — not just could use, but would feel compelled to use.
And you know, at the end of the day, I don't know anyone in a department or ministry of health who wants to read seventeen reports. So we had to consolidate it. And you and I, with the help of a lot of other people — and ultimately taking it back to some of the members of the different groups — spent a lot of time trying to do justice to what we had learned and to distill it, and also make it as immediately accessible and as intuitive as possible.
Dr. Tara Kiran Yeah. And just to build on that, Peter — I had several team members who spent hours combing through every report, pulling together all of the themes, bucketing them together. We looked at that multiple times to try to get the themes right. And then you and I and others talked about what the essence of those themes were and how we could communicate it as clearly as possible in words that reflected what we heard.
So yeah — the creation of the Our Care standard, the six statements, the language: as simple as they look, there was a lot of work behind the scenes to do justice to all the input we gathered and the rigour and breadth of the process.
And yeah, it is amazing to see now that the words in the Primary Care Act are different, but they essentially reflect the standard. So, for example, you have the concept of "province-wide" — that every person across the province should have the opportunity to have ongoing access to a primary care clinician or team. That's the same as the first part of the Our Care standard: that everyone deserved a primary care clinician connected with a team that was publicly funded.
The second piece in the Primary Care Act is "connected" — that every person should have the opportunity to receive primary care that's coordinated with existing health and social services. This really relates to the point we heard over and over again: that people wanted a wellness-oriented system. It wasn't enough for primary care to stand alone and be great — it had to connect to community and social services in particular.
Then there's the "convenient" piece — that everybody should have access to timely care. Again, the Our Care standard talks about timely and ongoing care.
Our Conservative government in Ontario included an objective using the word "inclusive" — that every person should have the opportunity to receive primary care that is free from barriers and discrimination.
The act talks about "empowered," and I actually really love that word. We didn't use it, but it relates to this idea of accountability that we had in the standards and also to this idea of having health records — that every person should have the opportunity to access their personal health information through a digitally integrated system.
And then the last objective is "responsive" — and this one ties into our standard related to accountability: the primary care system should respond to the needs of the communities it serves and have access to information about how the system is performing and adapting. So this idea of transparency.
So even though the words are different, they reflect very clearly the concepts behind the standard. Which is, I mean, I think a remarkable thing for people in Ontario. Too often you're told, "You're gonna do all this research, you're gonna put out a report with great advice, and I hope it doesn't sit on a shelf" — isn't that what everybody always says? Here we are, several years since we first spoke, and something quickly got pulled off the shelf and got transformed into something that will have, I hope, a very long life as part of Ontario's most important legislative frameworks — because it will shape how future generations of Ontarians get their primary care needs met.
Peter McLeod Let's step back. Not bad at all.
Dr. Tara Kiran Yeah, it's incredible to me. We published our final report in February 2024, and now it's June 2025. That's less than eighteen months from final report to legislation. And I think, as we alluded to earlier, this legislation obviously came so much from what we heard from patients and the public — but there were so many other things that happened in the system to get us here. The amazing attention from the government to primary care — some of that is because of the advocacy of Our Care, but also the advocacy of so many other people in the system who've been putting this forward. Patients and the public writing to MPs and MPPs saying this is an issue that matters. Members of the media who've been covering the story. And then of course Dr. Jane Philpott being appointed as the head of the primary care action table. Jane is known for getting things done, and she's been moving fast. And to have her paired with many people inside the government who also really support primary care — well, there's a lot of things that happened to create this window of opportunity where I think Our Care was able to kind of slip through and get here.
Peter McLeod That's it. I'm not sitting here feeling like either you or I were the instigators of any of this. It was very much a situation. And maybe you feel as surprised by all of this as I do?
Dr. Tara Kiran I definitely do. The stars just kept aligning. And sometimes, you know, sometimes that's just the way it happens. And I'm happy that it happened with you, because I think we've had a really fun time together as well.
Peter McLeod 100%.
Looking Ahead
Dr. Tara Kiran So just as we wrap up, Peter — what do you want to see happen next? Where do you think we should go?
Peter McLeod I want to see Ontarians get the primary care they've asked for. We are entirely capable of it as a society. We're rich enough, we have the human talent, we are smart enough to create better models of providing this care. So there could be no excuses. We know what we want, we've said what we want, we know largely how to get it, and the government has started to commit serious resources toward it.
I've already alluded to my bigger vision, though. I want to see processes like Our Care not be the exception, but for every government in the course of its mandate to say, "Here are the two or three big things that we need to have a big talk about" — and not feel threatened by what people might say, but actually realize that they'll be further ahead because they'll have the chance to learn and then create policies that really respond to these much broader, much deeper areas of agreement in our society. Rather than that forty-nine, fifty-one survey-says, election-results-determine-everything sensibility that I think we've all become prisoner to.
Voices of Our Care Participants
Dr. Tara Kiran I loved having this chance to reminisce with Peter about Our Care. And I thought before you go, I would play you just a few of the voices of the wonderful people who volunteered for the Our Care Provincial Priority Panels — who contributed to the creation of the Our Care standard, and in a sense, to the creation of the Primary Care Act in Ontario. Here they are talking about why they put their hand up to help with Our Care, and what they learned along the way.
Panelist 1 I volunteered to be a part of the Our Care panel because of my own health issues. I struggled between having a doctor, losing a doctor, and having a doctor again and losing a doctor, and being left to rely on walk-in clinics, which have not been able to help me in my own healthcare needs. I wanted to be able to provide our voice to the people who make policies in order to try and make it a better experience for other people going forward. Because I know personally I'll take what I've learned over the last four days back to my own town and area, and try and continue the work that I've come to realize is being done here in the group.
Panelist 2 I felt like I was a pretty good navigator of our healthcare system — and found out there's so much I don't know. And so if I don't know, as someone who thinks they know quite a bit and has used it a lot, how much do other people not know? And knowing that my generation is going to be inheriting this very important system, I feel like it's my duty as a citizen to do my best to build the system and improve it so that it can be sustainable for the long term.
Acknowledgements
Dr. Tara Kiran The Primary Care Act was the culmination of work by so many. Thank you to the patients and members of the public who gave up their time to participate in Our Care and share their stories, hopes, and desires. Thank you to the clinicians, researchers, healthcare leaders, and policymakers who volunteered as speakers or members of our advisory committees. Thanks to our funders: Staples Canada, the Max Bell Foundation, Health Canada, and the FTC Foundation.
And thanks to the many people who've been advocating for years for a better primary care system. And thank you to the Ontario government for passing this historic legislation, to the MPPs who voted for it — each and every one of you did — and to the Honourable Sylvia Jones and Dr. Jane Philpott for their leadership in lighting the way.
I should also mention that this is the last episode before our summer break. We look forward to sharing some more great content with you in September. I'm going to take you with me as I travel to some great clinics here in Canada, and then I'll take you to Costa Rica and also to Catalonia, Spain. I can't wait to share these stories with you.
Credits and Closing
Primary Focus was created by Dr. Tara Kiran and is made possible by a grant from the St. Michael's Foundation. Maryam Danesh is our research assistant. Seema Marwaha and Emily Holton are our creative advisors. Our producer is Avery Moore Kloss. Thank you to Yuri Markarov for producing the segment featuring the Our Care panelists — you can check the show notes to watch the full video.
Primary Focus is supported by a grant from the St. Michael's Foundation. Dr. Kiran is supported as the Fidani Chair in Improvement and Innovation at the University of Toronto, and as a scientist by the Departments of Family and Community Medicine at St. Michael's Hospital and the University of Toronto.
If you'd like to read more content from Dr. Kiran about Canada's primary care system, join the Substack newsletter at primaryfocus.substack.com, or visit primaryfocus.ca. For more information on the Our Care standard and the public's vision for a better primary care system, visit ourcare.ca.
Dr. Tara Kiran Okay, Peter — this is great. Thank you so much for being on.
Peter McLeod This has been a fun ride — a really fun ride for the last few years. And I'm so excited to see where we are.
Dr. Tara Kiran Thanks for calling.
Peter McLeod Call again. Thanks so much.
The information shared in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended as medical advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making any medical decisions or changes to your health routine. Views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations the speakers may be affiliated with.
Side effects of listening to this podcast may include: a strong impulse to help fix the primary care crisis in Canada; a feeling of anger over how many Canadians do not have access to primary care; increased feelings of empathy toward primary care professionals who are just trying to make it work; and intermittent visions of hope that we can find a better way.