Increasing Medical School Spaces Across Ontario

The Ontario government is meeting its commitment to train more doctors by creating 100 new spaces for first year medical students over the next three years. 

Spaces will be created at:

• McMaster University and its Waterloo Regional Campus and Niagara Regional Campus

• University of Toronto and its Mississauga Academy, to be completed September 2011

• University of Western Ontario and its satellite campus in Windsor 

• Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and
  

• University of Ottawa.

To support the expansion, the government is also providing $35 million over three years to complete construction of the new campuses, expand classrooms, buy training equipment and library resources, and improve video conferencing and webcasting between sites.

The majority of the new student spaces will be created in community campuses to ensure the sites have the ideal number of students for a high quality learning environment.  In 2006, the government invested in new medical education campuses to train doctors in more communities and improve access to health care across the province.  

More Doctors

HealthForceOntario is the province's strategy designed to make Ontario the employer-of-choice in health care and ensure that Ontarians have access to the right number and mix of qualified healthcare providers, now and in the future. The government's plan to increase the number of doctors in Ontario is working:

• Between 2002 and 2007 there was an overall increase of 2,210 of physicians in Ontario, up from 21,056 to 23,266.

• Since 2004, the government has more than doubled the number of International Medical Graduate (IMG) training and assessment positions, and continues to work with various stakeholders to further reduce barriers that IMGs face in qualifying for practice in Ontario. As a measure of the success of this program, more than 5,600 internationally-trained doctors are practicing in Ontario. 

• Between 2004 and 2008, the government increased the number of family medicine residency positions by 75 per cent or 151 positions.  As of June 2008, 330 additional family physicians graduated as a result.  A further expansion of 170 family medicine residency positions will take place between 2008 and 2014.
  

• As of September 2008, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine had students in all four years of its medical education program, and will be graduating its first class of 56 this spring.