An End to Hallway Medicine in ontario

Where Tyler Stands

Rebuild the workforce, starting with nurses 

Ontario cannot hire its way out of a problem it keeps recreating. In 2022, nearly 69% of nurses said they were considering leaving the professions and more than 75% reported burnout tied to workplace stress and short staffing. Evey experienced nurse who walks away takes years of skill with them and leaves a vacancy that costs far more to backfill than it would have to cost to prevent. As a result of losing talent, hospitals turn to private nursing agencies. The agency bills the public system a premium for a temporary worker with no long-term stake in the unit.  

Ontario should instead establish a dedicated provincial fund to support regional internal float pools. These pools would consist of permanently employed nurses who would be deployed across hospitals within a region to respond to temporary staffing shortages, seasonal demand, or unexpected surges in patient volumes. Unlike agency staff, internal float nurses remain part of the public healthcare system, are familiar with hospital policies and clinical workflows, and can integrate more quickly into care teams. This improves continuity of care while reducing administrative disruptions associated with temporary staffing.  

• The warning about the growing doctor shortage is directly echoed by the Ontario College of Family Physicians, which released forecasts projecting that the crisis will worsen significantly, leaving 1 in 4 Ontarians—or roughly 4.4 million people—without a family doctor by 2026. (Source: More Than Four Million Ontarians Will Be Without a Family Doctor by 2026 - OCFP) 

License the professionals already here 

Roughly 3,500 internationally trained physicians live in Ontario and Quebec, the vast majority unable to practice, while more than 2.5 million Ontarians have no family doctor. These are qualified professionals who are already here, already residents, and are being kept on the sidelines by process and unnecessary red tape. Ontario does not need to invest a new pathway – it needs to grow the one it has.  

Practice Ready Ontario assesses experienced internationally trained family physicians through a 12-week supervised clinical field assessment instead of requiring them to repeat up to two years of residency and places them in high-need communities under a three-year return of service agreement. However, the scale of the model falls short in terms of numbers, with a target of 50 candidates annually, and the placement of 73 physicians total in 2025. Ontario should expand Practice Ready Ontario to several hundred physicians annually, with multi-year funding so that program can plan and recruit at that scale.  

• In the capital region alone, a City of Ottawa Primary Care Strategy report found that at least 165,362 residents were without a provider as of 2022, with the local primary care sector estimating Ottawa needs 270 new primary care providers immediately just to meet current demand. (Source: City of Ottawa - Primary Care Provider Recruitment and Retention Strategy) 

Reinstate the Unconventional Spaces Measure 

In 2024-25, the government retired the "unconventional spaces" measure from Ontario Health's public reporting, one of the clearest public windows into hospital overcrowding. Removing the metric did not reduce hallway medicine. It reduced the public's ability to see it. The measure was dropped under an accountability agreement between Ontario Health and the Ministry of Health, a document the Ministry negotiates with the agency it oversees and revises every few years. No vote was held. No patient was asked. A government agreed with its own agency to stop publishing an inconvenient number about its own performance, and that was enough. 

Reinstating the measure would cost the province almost nothing because the counting has not stopped. Hospitals across the province still track these figures internally. The information exists; it is however no longer shared with the people it concerns. Public reporting changes behaviour; when performance is visible hospital by hospital, problems get attention and resources instead of being averaged away in a provincial total. That is why reporting should be monthly and hospital-level. A yearly provincial figure tells a patient nothing about the hospital they are walking into, and it arrives far too late to inform clinical planning or public debate. A family deciding where to take a sick parent, a nurse manager planning staffing, and a community fighting for its emergency department all need current, local numbers. 

• Regional data supports this strain, showing that multiple Ottawa hospitals operate well above safe bed-occupancy thresholds (which should not exceed 85%); the Ottawa Hospital recently reached 99% occupancy, while Nepean's Queensway Carleton Hospital operated at an 87% occupancy rate, resulting in a cumulative need for 250 additional beds across the city. (Source: Stretched to the Limit: Hospital Union Rally at Queensway Carleton - Business Wire)