Dr. Tara Kiran, a family physician and researcher at St. Michael’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions.
Canada is facing a critical shortage of family doctors—a reality that’s putting the health and well-being of millions of Canadians at risk.
It’s an issue that Dr. Tara Kiran, a family physician and researcher at St. Michael’s Hospital’s MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, is deeply passionate about addressing. Throughout her career, she has focused on identifying innovative solutions to improve access to high quality care for everyone.
In 2022, Dr. Kiran—who is also the Fidani Chair of Improvement and Innovation at the University of Toronto—launched OurCare, a first-of-its-kind national initiative to centre the voices of patients across Canada in the conversation about primary care reform.
And this year, she launched Primary Focus—a hopeful, story-driven podcast that brings listeners inside innovative clinics and health systems in Canada and around the world. Through conversations with clinicians, researchers, patients, and policy-makers, the podcast explores bold ideas to fix what’s broken in primary care—and build something better. The first seven episodes of Primary Focus are available now wherever you get your podcasts!
We recently sat down with Dr. Kiran to learn more about the primary care crisis, OurCare, and her new podcast. Check it out below!
Q: Let’s start by talking about the primary care crisis in Canada. What is it and how does it play out in people’s day to day lives?
Right now, more than one in five people in Canada do not have a family doctor or nurse practitioner they can see regularly. That’s a statistic we surfaced through a survey conducted through OurCare in 2022, and it means more than 6.5 million people in Canada are without access to primary care.
This is a horrible situation given how important primary care is to a person and to the functioning of the healthcare system. Primary care is often called the front door to the healthcare system; it’s where you’re supposed to go if you have a new problem but also to manage existing concerns. Family doctors also coordinate patients’ journeys across the healthcare system, and they’re supposed to support you over the course of your whole life.
Without primary care, patients have nowhere to turn and end up accessing other parts of the healthcare system that are not designed to support their ongoing needs, like walk-in clinics or emergency departments. So we have a growing number of people in Canada whose essential care needs are not being met because they don’t have access to primary care.
If we don’t address this crisis, it will only get worse as the population ages.
Q: One of the ways you’ve been working to address the primary care crisis is through the OurCare initiative. What is it and how does it work?
I’ve been a family doctor for more than 20 years and a researcher for more than 15 years. During that time, I’ve been involved in a lot of different conversations about healthcare reform with clinicians, researchers, government, and policy experts. But the voices of patients are almost always missing. And those are the very people systems should be designed around.
OurCare is addressing this gap. It’s the largest national initiative to engage patients and the public on the issue of primary care reform in Canada.
In total, over 16 months, we heard from nearly 10,000 people who collectively spent almost 10,000 hours with us through three different phases of the project, including surveys, provincial panels, and community roundtables. You can read the final report from this initial work on our website.
Q: What are some of the key recommendations that have surfaced through OurCare?
There are so many different ideas out there, but one of our key findings was that people are open to new ways of receiving care.
For example, 91% of OurCare survey respondents indicated they are somewhat or very willing to see a nurse practitioner consistently for more health concerns instead of a family doctor, except when the nurse practitioner feels a physician is required.
When it comes to improving coordination and consistency of care, 94% of all respondents felt strongly that it’s important to have one single personal health record that any healthcare professional in their province can access.
Based on all of our findings, we developed the OurCare Standard—a series of six key objectives that represent Canadians’ aspirations for a more sustainable, accessible, and equitable system. The OurCare Standard can be found on our website and in the final report.
Q: In addition to OurCare, you have recently launched a podcast, Primary Focus, to engage an even wider audience on this topic. What can listeners expect from the podcast?
I launched Primary Focus to create space for a national conversation about how we can do things differently in primary care.
As I travelled around the country for OurCare, I saw that there are a lot of amazing things happening in different provinces when it comes to primary care, and a lot of motivated people. I wanted to tell some of those stories. I’ve also been able to visit three different countries over the past year to learn about their primary care systems, so there are a few episodes featuring a behind-the-scenes look at some of those experiences—like visiting a clinic in the Netherlands and learning how they’re doing things differently.
My hope is that by bringing listeners on a journey with me, we can think about what we can do in our own healthcare system to serve everyone with high quality primary care.
Q: Based on everything you’ve seen and heard, do you feel that change is on the horizon for primary care in Canada?
I’m hopeful. I think we’ve finally gotten the attention of people in power when it comes to the nature of the crisis we’re in and the importance of addressing it. I think people in Canada are speaking loudly about how much this issue matters to them. And I think governments are listening.
In fact, in May 2025, the Ontario government introduced the Primary Care Act—a historic piece of legislation that became law on June 5, making Ontario the first Canadian jurisdiction to establish a framework for its primary care system. It lays out six main objectives for the future of primary care—objectives that are based on the OurCare Standard!
This is an incredible step forward for the healthcare system and for everyone in Ontario. And it’s more important than ever right now, as many family doctors prepare to retire and the population ages. So while there may be points where things are even more stretched, it’s crucial that we’re paying attention to the problem now and putting new structures in place to prevent the crisis from worsening.
Thank you so much, Dr. Kiran! You can get involved with the national conversation on primary care by listening to the Primary Focus podcast and visiting the OurCare website to participate in the latest survey before it closes on July 9.
This is what it looks like when our doctors and donors come together to shape the future of healthcare. Thanks to the visionary support of Staples Canada — Even the Odds Campaign, Max Bell Foundation, and Health Canada | Santé Canada, we're taking a historic step toward solving Canada’s primary care crisis.
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