What the 2025 OurCare Survey Tells Us About Healthcare in Canada, with Kelly Grant
More than 5.8 million adults in Canada don't have a regular family doctor, nurse practitioner or primary care clinic--and where you live has a lot to do with whether you're one of them. To make sense of the newest research on primary care in Canada, Dr. Tara Kiran flips the script and welcomes award-winning health reporter Kelly Grant from The Globe and Mail to ask her the tough questions.
Together, they dig deep into the newly released 2025 OurCare Survey data, exploring why provinces like Manitoba and Ontario are faring better, why Quebec leads the nation in out-of-pocket medical fees, and why patients in the Territories report being more satisfied with care. The data raises as many questions about healthcare as it answers — which is exactly what makes this conversation worth hearing.
Explore the Data
The 2025 OurCare Survey tracks how primary care is performing in every province and territory. You can dive into the results yourself at OurCare.ca
Read the reports at OurCare.ca/survey
Explore the interactive dashboard at data.ourcare.ca
Read Kelly’s piece in the Globe and Mail summarizing the key findings
Mainpro+ Credits
Family doctors in Canada can now earn Mainpro+ credits by listening to Primary Focus Podcast episodes published after May 1, 2026.
This self-learning Group Learning program has been certified by the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Ontario Chapter for up to 30 Mainpro+ credits, with 1 credit available per eligible episode. To claim your credit, listen to the episode, review the show notes and complete the self-learning survey. Your certificate will be emailed to you. Find more information at OurCare.ca/podcast
Listen to an episode about the genesis of the OurCare Survey
A historic win for primary care in Ontario with Peter MacLeod
Why millions of Canadians are still waiting for a family doctor with Dr. Danielle Martin
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What the 2025 OurCare Survey Tells Us About Healthcare in Canada, with Kelly Grant
Primary Focus Podcast
Pre-Show: Calling Kelly
Dr. Tara Kiran (00:03) Tara. Is that you?
Kelly Grant (00:05) That's me.
Dr. Tara Kiran Hey. Hi, Kelly. I have a favor to ask. You know, I put out the Our Care report earlier this year, and I wanted to do a podcast episode on it, but I didn't want it to just be me talking. So I thought, who else could I talk to about this report? Who else knows primary care so well, and the report so well? And I thought of you.
Kelly Grant Well, thank you for thinking of me. I also think you underestimate how much people like listening to you for extended periods, so don't knock yourself too hard there. But yes, I've been following primary care for years, and I've always found your Our Care reports to be a really huge reporting resource for me. So I'm totally happy to talk about it.
Dr. Tara Kiran (00:43) Thank you. And you ask the best questions, so I thought, might as well capture that on the podcast.
Kelly Grant (00:48) Well, that sounds good to me.
Introduction
Dr. Tara Kiran (01:00) Welcome to Primary Focus. I'm Dr. Tara Kiran, and we're here to imagine a primary care system in Canada that works for everyone. I feel strongly that a better system should reflect what matters most to patients and the public — the very people the system is designed to serve. That's why in 2022, we launched Our Care/Nos Soins, the largest-ever public dialogue about the future of primary care in Canada. We had conversations across the country, and what was amazing to me was that despite the diversity of the people we heard from, the same themes kept cropping up over and over again.
When all those conversations were done, we distilled everything we heard into what we call the Our Care standard — six simple statements describing what every person in Canada should be able to expect from the primary care system. It starts, of course, with everybody having access to primary care: a clinician working in a team, that's publicly covered, provides timely and ongoing care, that's connected to community and social services and supports overall well-being, a system where you have access to your own data, where care is culturally safe, and ultimately accountable to the communities it serves.
So I know what you're thinking — wonderful vision, but how does it actually measure up to the reality in Canada today? That's what we're going to talk about. On today's episode, we're doing a deep dive into the results of our most recent work: the 2025 Our Care National Survey, where we heard from nearly 17,000 people across the country about their experiences of care.
I could have just done a monologue episode to tell you what we found, but I thought it would be so much more interesting to phone a friend. So for this episode, I'd like you to meet Canadian healthcare reporter Kelly Grant.
Kelly Grant (02:43) Hi, my name is Kelly Grant. I'm a health reporter for the Globe and Mail, and I'm a mom of three boys.
Dr. Tara Kiran (02:49) Usually on Primary Focus, I'm the one asking the questions. But as you'll hear, I decided for this episode to bring Kelly in to do what she does best: ask really good questions about primary care in Canada. Soon after we start chatting, she jumps right in to ask me about the first Our Care standard element. Here's our conversation.
Access to Primary Care
Kelly Grant (03:17) I have to tell you, as a healthcare reporter, it was so valuable to me when you and your team put out the first report. We hear all of these anecdotes about people who can't find a doctor, but the data on it has historically not been great. We'd always been relying on Statistics Canada surveys — usually as part of what's called the Canadian Community Health Survey, a regular StatsCan survey that asks all kinds of different questions, but usually just one question about primary care access: do you have a regular healthcare provider? Beyond that, we had very little data — not just about whether people have a doctor, but about what they're looking for in a doctor or nurse practitioner, whether they can actually see them if they have one, what the differences are from province to province, and whether they're paying out of pocket for any of the services.
So I hadn't really read a survey like yours that had that kind of depth of information and sample size, and also didn't come from, say, a private company with a particular angle. Especially now that there's so much interest in the virtual primary care pay space, I get hit with a lot of surveys sponsored by virtual care providers — surveying people about how bad their access is in the public system, with a larger intent in mind.
Can we talk about the first standard — that everyone should have access to primary care? What did you find in this latest survey, and how did that compare to what you found a couple of years ago, the first time you did this exercise?
Dr. Tara Kiran (05:04) Yeah, so probably one of our key findings was that 83% of people in Canada said they had some source of primary care — either a family doctor, a nurse practitioner, or a regular place of care they could go. A really important note is that although 83% was the average across Canada, it varied a lot between provinces and territories — from 63% in PEI to 89% in Manitoba or Ontario. So a huge range in terms of how people can access care depending on where they live.
To your point, 83% is not nearly good enough — it means 5.8 million adults still don't have primary care. But it is better than it was back in 2022, when it was 77%.
Kelly Grant (05:58) Like you say — not good enough, certainly not good enough for those people who don't have access — but it did get better. Do you know why there was improvement?
Dr. Tara Kiran (06:07) That's such an important question we need to dig into. I'd like to think some of it relates to the focus and attention governments have been putting on primary care, and the related dollars. We know it was a federal priority — they've tagged some money to primary care. We know primary care has become a political issue in many provinces, not all, and that some provinces have invested in teams. Many have also struck new payment agreements with doctors. Provinces and territories across the country have worked on integrating foreign-trained professionals, and they're investing in medical schools and adding more placements — though I think that will take more time to show up in the numbers.
I'll also say the other factor is that 2022 was still really in the heart of the pandemic, and we've now come out of that emergency state and things have stabilized. So part of it is also that we're now past what I hope was a low point that was partly driven by those really challenging pandemic times.
Provincial Differences
Kelly Grant (07:15) The other thing I was really interested in, in that section of the recent report, was the differences between provinces. Can we talk about some of the things that the successful provinces are doing well, and some of the things the other provinces maybe aren't doing so well?
Dr. Tara Kiran (07:24) I think it all comes down to policy choices that provinces and territories have made over the last few decades. Sometimes we like to blame geography for challenges in Canada, but one of the things that's clear from the report is that geography alone can't explain it — you see provinces with similar rural-urban splits doing quite differently.
Let's think about the provinces that are faring relatively well: Alberta, Ontario, and Manitoba are all above the national average for access to primary care. I think one factor is that historically, family doctors in Alberta and Ontario have made more money than elsewhere, so those provinces did things to make family medicine an attractive profession. The other piece is that all three have invested in teams, but in different ways. In Ontario, back in 2005, there was a huge investment and push into the family health team model. In Alberta, they have primary care networks that house lots of other health professionals that family doctors and patients can access. And in Manitoba, they expanded something called access centres, which is kind of like a community health centre model. So I think that team element may be part of it.
But teams aren't the whole answer, because we also see a province like Quebec, where only 73% of people say they have access to primary care — and Quebec actually has probably some of the most team-based primary care in the country. So that on its own is not a solution; it's just potentially part of the larger answer.
Kelly Grant (09:14) Do you ever sometimes think that maybe we're overthinking this, and the answer is just: you have to pay family doctors a lot more if you want more of them?
Dr. Tara Kiran (09:22) Well, I think there are some medical associations that would agree with you, Kelly. It's an interesting point. I don't think it's just the absolute amount of money — I'd say it's the relative respect of family doctors compared to other specialists. The other really important factor in Canada is that we actually don't have enough doctors per population compared to other OECD countries. Countries I've looked at that have 95% or more of their population with primary care often have 1.5 to two times as many doctors per population as we do in Canada. So I think just paying doctors more is probably not going to be the only way we get there.
The other piece — I'll be honest — is that when I look internationally, doctors in Canada have some of the most autonomy compared to doctors globally. That includes our peers in the United States, most of whom actually work for larger healthcare organizations and are employees. Part of the challenge in Canada is that we don't have an organized way of ensuring everybody has care — instead, we rely on family doctors making individual choices about which areas to practice in and what hours their clinic should be open. Those doctors are making rational choices for themselves, but they don't necessarily align with broader community needs, because that's not their specific job as an individual doctor. We need an organizational approach to make sure there are doctors in each of the regions where we need them.
Kelly Grant (11:01) Yeah, that's always one of the things I find most fascinating about the Canadian system, and one I didn't really understand until I started reporting on this. Most family doctors in Canada are small business people — just like a person who owns a retail store or a coffee shop, they can decide where they want to locate and what hours they want to run. There's not really a way to say, "Actually, what we don't need is a dozen more doctors working in downtown Toronto — what we need is doctors working in a small town in Northern Ontario, and we need you to keep your office open until eight o'clock four nights a week, and open on Saturdays."
If you're a doctor whose services are very much in demand, and you can earn enough to live comfortably keeping your office open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday to Thursday, at the end of the day there's not a ton the government can do about that. They're trying to fix it through how they deploy funding, how they pay doctors, how they structure incentives, and by creating team-based care — but it's an uphill battle.
The thing I find most interesting is that, from my understanding of the history, doctors were originally very protective of their autonomy and very interested in maintaining it when the system was developed. Now, when I interview younger doctors, a constant refrain I hear is: "I don't want to practice this way. I don't want to be a small business owner." The autonomy isn't as important to them — they'd much rather go in, work as a salaried employee at a clinic, focus on their patients, and go home at the end of the day, without also being a business owner on the side. So this thing doctors really wanted fifty or sixty years ago is now actually turning younger doctors away from wanting to practice primary care, which I find really interesting. Have you seen that in your experience?
Dr. Tara Kiran (13:13) I think a lot of the qualitative and survey research on younger doctors corroborates what you're saying, Kelly. At the same time, my experience talking to doctors is that they really want both — they want to maintain professional autonomy, but also not be a small business owner. That's a hard needle to thread. I feel optimistic that in some provinces we're moving toward having primary care clinics run by the province, a municipality, or a nonprofit organization, where doctors can just come in and work. We'll see if more doctors can be recruited into those clinics, along with some of the payment changes and other recruitment efforts we're seeing.
But your question really gets at another important point, Kelly: doctors choose their own hours and set up their own businesses, and one of the things we found in our survey is that people are really challenged to get timely care — even people who have a family doctor. Where we perform well is that when people do come in, most are able to see their own doctor, and we know that continuity of relationship is really important. But the flip side is that they're often struggling to get in when they have a timely need. One stat that sticks out to me is that only 45% of people said they were always or usually able to get an appointment when their doctor or nurse practitioner was away from the clinic. Doctors get sick, doctors take vacation. I think about my own setting, and I feel really lucky — when I take a vacation, I know my colleagues will cover the urgent issues for my patients. But it's pretty clear that most people in Canada aren't with a doctor or nurse practitioner working in that kind of group model, where colleagues cross-cover for each other's patients.
Kelly Grant (15:24) Do people care that much about seeing their own doctor all the time? If they get to see them every now and then, but when they've got a sick kid or something they're really concerned about and need to see somebody that day or the next day — do patients care that much if they see one of your colleagues, or are they just happy that somebody will see them on short notice if you're not there?
Dr. Tara Kiran (15:46) Some of the research we've done shows that people care about both — they want timely access and they want their own doctor; they want it all. But to be fair, I think a middle ground for most people is seeing someone who has access to their records, if it means being seen sooner. I do think our system, the way it's been designed overall, really emphasizes continuity of relationship over continuity of information — and over timeliness. We know timeliness is really important. So to your point, Kelly, when somebody is sick, they want to be seen, and in those circumstances it doesn't matter as much who they see, compared to a chronic issue, or an ongoing mental health condition where they've disclosed something sensitive to a particular provider — there, the ongoing relationship really changes the conversation.
Paying Out of Pocket
Kelly Grant (16:39) One of the other aspects of this report I was really interested in was what you found about how and why people are paying out of pocket. Can you talk to me about those findings?
Dr. Tara Kiran (16:47) Yeah. We asked both people who have a family doctor and people who don't whether they paid out of pocket for primary care. Both groups did — about 10 to 12% of each group said they paid out of pocket. But there was a really big difference in what they were paying for. Among the group that did have a family doctor, most of the time they were paying for forms, notes, maybe a prescription renewal — the kinds of things that are technically not covered under the schedule of benefits, or what provincial health insurance pays doctors to do. So charging for things like forms or sick notes is technically allowed, and it's not surprising that's what people say they're paying for.
But the worrying part is that among people who didn't have a family doctor, about 70% said they were paying for an appointment or consultation. That's really worrying — it means many people without a family doctor are paying for good old-fashioned primary care because they haven't been able to access it through the public system. What was really striking was that the proportion paying out of pocket among those without primary care was about double in Quebec — about 20% of people without primary care in Quebec reported paying out of pocket.
Kelly Grant (18:21) I know there will be people listening who will ask: wait a minute, I didn't think I was allowed to pay out of pocket for medically necessary care. How is this even happening?
Dr. Tara Kiran (18:32) Well, I'm not a legal expert, but I do think there are some loopholes that entrepreneurs can take advantage of — loopholes that also serve people who are genuinely struggling to access care. In particular, there's been controversy for some time about whether nurse practitioner primary care is covered under the Canada Health Act. There's now an interpretation letter from the federal government clarifying that it is. But for many years, this was a real gray area, and that's why we saw this rise of nurse practitioner clinics charging for care, because nurse practitioners technically weren't a covered service under the Canada Health Act. That was one kind of loophole — potentially legally allowed, even if it wasn't really in the spirit of what the Canada Health Act is about.
The other piece is that there's a completely different legal framework in Quebec that has allowed the growth of private primary care, which is why we're seeing so much more of it there than anywhere else.
Kelly Grant (19:40) I'm not sure if the Our Care report went into this deeply enough, but from some of your other work in Quebec — what is satisfaction with healthcare like there? Do people appreciate being able to buy primary care services if they're not otherwise available? My sense is that people in Quebec tend not to be super happy about their healthcare access, but I wonder what you found.
Dr. Tara Kiran (20:07) One of the striking things about our survey findings was that primary care satisfaction in Canada was, unsurprisingly, low — and it was low everywhere, across all provinces, whether access was relatively better or relatively worse. Overall, about 28% of people in Canada said they were satisfied with how the primary care system is working. That's a real indictment of our current system.
The proportion who said they were satisfied was actually a lot higher in the territories — still low, but higher, somewhere between 35 and 38%. That was really interesting to me. What's different in the territories that more people are saying they're satisfied? Is it expectations, or is it also their model of care? Because there are some real differences in the territories.
I know we've gone away from your question about Quebec, but I find this question of care delivery in the territories really interesting. They have a model of care that's much more community-based, especially in smaller centres — there's one centre everybody knows they can go to if they need care. The centre is generally open all the time, but people aren't necessarily seeing a doctor; they're seeing a nurse or nurse practitioner. We see many more nurse practitioner attachments in some of the territories than elsewhere. We also see people reporting more chances to be involved in shaping their care, and that they knew what to do if there was a quality-of-care issue. So a very different delivery system — and it's hard to know whether we're seeing better satisfaction in the territories because that delivery system works better for some people, or because people's expectations are just different.
Kelly Grant (22:07) Yeah, it's a good question. I did a fair bit of reporting in Nunavut a couple of years ago — I went to six different communities in that territory, reporting specifically on their healthcare system. I spent time learning about their community health centre model, and I can see some of the benefits and why people would be satisfied with some of what they offer. It's easy to navigate, in the sense that these communities are quite small, so there's no confusion about where to go if you have a physical or mental health issue. The centres also serve as community anchors — people on the Hamlet councils are often also involved in the groups that run the health centre. It's easy to navigate, and the centres are often open 24 hours a day. So for some people in these communities, the access can feel pretty good.
On the other hand, for almost everything other than the most basic primary care, people have to be flown out — either to one of the major centres in the territory, or south, to Ottawa or Edmonton. So there's a lot of travel involved. But this comes back to the question of expectations: in Nunavut, at least, all these communities are fly-in communities — there are no roads connecting them, you can only get in by boat or by plane. So if you're used to having to fly out for everything, perhaps you're also used to having to fly out for any kind of major medical care, like a surgery.
Dr. Tara Kiran (23:45) Really interesting reflection. I'm actually thinking about a conversation I had with senior government officials in Nunavut before we released our findings by province and territory. We met with senior officials in every province and territory, and when we met with the ones in Nunavut, they looked at their data and were surprised they didn't fare even better. They said, "Did you sample all of the communities? Because in every community there is a centre, and people can go anytime" — exactly as you say. They suggested maybe we'd oversampled in [uncertain: Iqaluit], and you know, some of our sample relates to that — maybe it's harder to get into the centre there than in some of the smaller communities. But it's a really good point, and it's something I remind myself of. We often talk about moving toward a geographic-based or school-based model for primary care — and actually, we already have that in some parts of our country, particularly the North. So is that a model others can learn from?
What's Next for Our Care
Kelly Grant (24:51) Do you have plans for what you're going to do next with Our Care?
Dr. Tara Kiran (24:55) Good question. I think we want to continue shining a light on primary care through these kinds of surveys — we still have plans to share more reports, and perhaps some peer-reviewed publications with more deep analysis. The other piece I'm really passionate about is how we can actually change policy to try to achieve the Our Care standard. We know Ontario passed the Primary Care Act, and I'd love to see that passed elsewhere.
Kelly Grant (25:24) What do you think about some of the changes Ontario has made recently to primary care?
Dr. Tara Kiran (25:29) I'm hoping we can do a deeper dive on that in an upcoming episode. But I'm a big fan of the fact that Ontario has committed to having everybody have primary care by 2029 — that's an ambitious goal, but I think we need that kind of ambition. I think they're taking the right approach by making resources available to support the growth of team-based primary care, and trying to be strategic about supporting these new teams to grow the capacity of doctors to serve more people. We know we have a doctor shortage, and the only way doctors can serve more people is if they work in a team.
The government has also negotiated a new agreement with family doctors and doctors more broadly that makes family medicine more attractive financially, so I'm hoping that stabilizes the workforce. There's also good movement on medical school enrollment increases and foreign-trained professional integration. The area we're still waiting to see play out is whether we can actually transition to a geographic-based or school-based model. Jane Philpott spoke a lot about that in her writing and speaking before taking on this role, so I think everyone's curious to see how we can transition what we have now into something closer to a guaranteed-access model.
Kelly Grant (26:55) So many people seem to like that geographic, public-school-style idea in theory — but it seems to have been very hard to pull off. Why do you think that is?
Dr. Tara Kiran (27:07) I think it comes back to what we talked about: the autonomy of doctors in the system. Doctors right now choose where to practice, what hours their practice is open, and which patients they accept. Interestingly, right after this episode, we're actually going to feature a series on Spain — and in Spain, they do have a geographic, school-type model for primary care. There's a centre in every community, and everyone knows that if they need primary care, it's simple — you just go to the centre. You don't need to register in advance; anyone who lives in the community has the right to go and be served. The government has to figure out the resourcing to make sure each centre has enough staff to serve a changing population, and that can be challenging — countries around the world are facing health human resource shortages and demographic changes. But there's a planned approach to dealing with that.
Of course, the model looks really different, with everyone being an employee at that centre. Those centres, although not directly government-run, are mostly run by one kind of agency, based on government funding. So a really different model. It shows it can work, but I think what we need to do here is think about how to transition our current model — keeping what's working, because there's a lot that is working well — while also making sure people who don't have care know where to go. That's a bit tricky. I do feel hopeful that having more teams, with those teams holding a geographic mandate, is one way we'll get there. So let's hope.
Data Access and Accountability
Kelly Grant (28:58) Now, are those clinics — and other clinics in parts of Europe with this kind of model — better about the interoperability and sharing of records? I know that was another question you asked in Our Care, and it didn't fare particularly well.
Dr. Tara Kiran (29:16) Many European countries are just better at sharing data with patients. That's partly because both in the US and in Europe, there's legislation guaranteeing people access to their records. In Canada, people technically have a legal right to their records, but practically speaking, it's not made easy, and most people don't even recognize it's a legal right. Our hope is that going forward, some of the federal changes happening around Bill S-5 will make it easier to share data between different parts of the healthcare system, and ultimately with patients.
But as you said, Kelly, our data really shines a light on what a big gap this is. We heard over and over from people how frustrated they were that they couldn't access their own health data. We saw huge variation between provinces on this issue. Overall, only about 65% of people said they could access one or more records online, and about a quarter said they didn't know if their records were available online at all. That ranged from about 25% of people who said they could access something online in Manitoba, to about 86% in Saskatchewan. In general, we saw that in many Western provinces, people recognize there are ways to access their data, while in places like Manitoba and the territories, there isn't an easy place to access that data — so unsurprisingly, we see a very small proportion saying they can.
What's been interesting is that in places like many of the Atlantic provinces, there are now apps where people can access their data, but many people don't know about it. So even in the Atlantic provinces, a lot of people said they don't have access to the data, when in fact it is available to them — they just don't know.
Kelly Grant (31:19) Yeah, the other thing they probably don't know — not just about records, but about anything else — is where to complain. They don't know how to hold their primary care provider accountable. You asked about that too in the Our Care survey, right?
Dr. Tara Kiran (31:33) Yeah, that was actually kind of shocking to me — how bad it was in terms of people knowing how to navigate the system. Only about 22% of people said they knew what to do if they had a problem with the care they were getting. That's a problem. In many high-performing primary care systems — thinking about countries like the Netherlands or Denmark — there are actually very structured complaint systems, and I think that's partly what keeps the whole system accountable. In Canada, you can complain about your physician or nurse to the college, but you can't really provide constructive feedback easily about things like, "I can't get in to see my doctor when I need to." That's not something you'd escalate to a professional college. So people don't know what to do when they have a problem, partly because we haven't made clear what they should do, and haven't created those pathways.
Turning the Tables: Kelly's Reflections
Dr. Tara Kiran Kelly, I'm wondering if I could flip the script and ask you a question, because you've done a ton of reporting on primary care — in fact, I think a lot of your reporting really coincided with the beginning of Our Care, back in 2022. I wonder what struck you about these findings, given all the reporting you've done.
Kelly Grant (32:53) I'm always really fascinated by the differences from place to place. We're the same country, and as you say, even though there's this fairly big rural-urban divide, every province has some portions that are very urban and some that are very rural — and yet some provinces are doing so much better than others. I'm always very interested, at a nuts-and-bolts level, in what actually works to get people doctors. So seeing the data in Our Care really helped crystallize that for me. That's certainly one of the things that interested me most.
I think you can probably tell I'm also interested in the question of what people are paying out of pocket for, how that comes up, and why — not necessarily because I think it's inherently a bad thing. There are plenty of other countries around the world where having some mix of public and private seems to work well. I don't know the answer, because I haven't lived in a country with a system like that, or had much chance to do that kind of international reporting on systems in Europe or Australia or elsewhere. Maybe I should bug my editors for some more European reporting — I could come with you to Spain. So yeah, those are two of the things: the disparity between provinces, and what's behind people having to pay for a primary care service that most of us in Canada think we already pay for with our tax dollars, and then just walk in and use our health card to access.
Dr. Tara Kiran (34:23) In some ways, what I'm hearing is that the survey opened up more questions than it answered. So if we're going to do this survey again, which I hope we will, what would be some of the questions you'd be interested in having answered?
Kelly Grant (34:39) Okay, so I'd want maybe a slightly different survey with different targets — I'd want to ask doctors. What would it take to make you practice in a certain way, or in a certain place? So much depends on whether doctors are eager and willing to practice in certain ways and places. What would get you interested in primary care? What would it take to convince you to work in a rural or remote location? How important are hours and work-life balance to you? I'm sure people are asking this, and I've read research on the subject, but as patients we're also very dependent on how the system attracts and retains doctors. So a survey where we got to hear those kinds of deep questions — like the ones you asked patients in the other Our Care reports — but asked of doctors, is something I'd be interested in.
Dr. Tara Kiran (35:36) Love that. I actually think I know some researchers who might be working on that, so I'll pass your questions along to them.
Well, Kelly, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a wonderful discussion, and I'm so glad you found the Our Care survey, report, and findings useful for your reporting. I'm so glad you're able to shine a light on primary care across the country and keep Canadians informed about what's happening, through high-quality health journalism. So thank you for what you do.
Kelly Grant (36:13) Thank you, and thank you for doing this work, and for always being willing to talk to me about it for my reporting.
Dr. Tara Kiran (36:18) My pleasure.
Closing
Dr. Tara Kiran Big thank you to Kelly Grant from the Globe and Mail for joining me to unpack our most recent Our Care survey results and to share her own reflections on the state of primary care in Canada.
If you want to explore the Our Care data yourself, head to our website, ourcare.ca — O-U-R-C-A-R-E dot C-A. There you'll find two reports from our survey, as well as an interactive dashboard where you can explore the data yourself, for all of Canada and for each province and territory. The survey asks questions about every Our Care standard element and includes tons of questions we didn't get to today — data on teams, travel time, cultural respect, support for well-being, and so much more.
I mentioned it in this episode, but stay tuned — coming up in a couple of weeks is the first episode in our multi-part series about primary care in Spain. In past episodes, we've talked a lot about a public-school model of primary care: what if primary care were designed like the public school system, so that in every neighbourhood there was a health centre and you were just guaranteed access to care right there? In Spain, that's how primary care works. You'll travel with me to Catalonia, and we'll learn more about the system and visit some actual clinics. I can't wait.
I also have some great news for family doctors in Canada: episodes of Primary Focus published after May 1st, 2026, are now Mainpro+ accredited. To claim your credit, go to the show notes, review the session resources, and click the link to the self-learning survey. All you need to do is complete a few short questions, and your certificate will be available for download. You can also visit ourcare.ca/podcast for details and access to accredited episodes — that's O-U-R-C-A-R-E dot C-A slash podcast.
Credits
Primary Focus was created by Dr. Tara Kiran and is made possible by funding from the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, the St. Michael's Foundation, and the Max Bell Foundation. Huge thanks to our advisors, Emily Holton, Seema Marwaha, Erin Plenert, and Thuy Nga Pham, and our research coordinator, Maryam Danesh. Our producer is Avery Moore Kloss.
If you'd like to read more content from Dr. Kiran about Canada's primary care system, join the Substack newsletter at primaryfocus.com, or follow her on LinkedIn.
I put a lot of work into these episodes, and I sure hope you're enjoying them. I always love your feedback and your suggestions for other things we can feature — email us at primaryfocus@unityhealth.to with your comments or suggestions. And if you're enjoying these episodes, please follow us on your favourite podcast app so you don't miss one. I'd also love your support in getting more people listening — you can do this by leaving a review on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast app. We'd also love for you to share this podcast with friends, colleagues, and neighbours — because if we really want to build a better primary care system, we need to engage everyone in the conversation.
Dr. Tara Kiran Thanks so much, Kelly, for joining today. Really appreciate it — it was super fun.
Kelly Grant (39:48) It was fun for me too. Thanks, Tara. Okay.
Dr. Tara Kiran (39:50) All right.