Second of four of the Ford government-promised private clinics begins orthopedic surgeries after nine months

Posted: October 3, 2026

(October 2, 2026) By: Tom Desormeaux, The Trillium

Richmond Hill’s Schroeder Ambulatory Centre has joined Toronto-based OV Surgical as the first private clinics to perform publicly funded major orthopedic surgeries in Ontario

Nearly 10 months after the Ford government promised new licences for private clinics to perform publicly funded hip and knee replacements, a second facility has begun performing the surgeries.

Schroeder Ambulatory Centre, a not-for-profit health-care facility in Richmond Hill, is now accepting patients for orthopedic surgery, specifically referrals for hip and knee replacement surgery, the clinic confirmed this week.

Ontario’s Ministry of Health said Schroeder is now licensed to provide orthopedic surgical services and can offer OHIP-covered care, after completing the Integrated Community Health Services Centres certification process in September.

Dr. Sebastian Rodriguez-Elizalde, an orthopedic surgeon who works with Schroeder, called the clinic a “new opportunity to expand access to surgical care in Ontario,” in a social media post on Saturday.

“Yesterday, we performed the first total hip and knee replacements at the Schroeder Ambulatory Centre,” Dr. Rodriguez-Elizalde’s post reads. “It was a privilege to be part of this milestone – and to see the team and facility come together so successfully for our patients.”

The Ontario government’s online community surgical and diagnostic centres database shows that Schroeder was also licensed to perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and GI-endoscopy procedures in March and June of this year, respectively.

The government first mentioned its plans for publicly funded private orthopedic surgeries in 2023. At the time, it presented a three-phase plan to expand the number of procedures to be done in private clinics and reduce surgical wait times. The Health Ministry promised then that these surgeries — the third phase — would begin in 2024.

Two years later, in December 2025, Ontario announced $125 million in funding to help license four community surgical and diagnostic centres for orthopedic surgeries, updating its timeline for issuing licenses to early 2026.

“Surgery went well. Three patients went home the same day and the team was happy,” said Dr. Rodriguez-Elizalde in an interview. “It was a good proof of concept.”

The Trillium previously reported that Manitoba-born billionaire Walter Schroeder purchased the property for the Schroeder facility in October 2021, with hopes of increasing efficiency in health care and helping people access surgery.

The other three clinics the Ford government announced funding for last December are owned by for-profit corporations.

According to the government’s database, the OV Surgical Centre in Toronto received its licence on Feb. 28. When asked for comment in early September, the clinic confirmed it was already performing publicly funded hip and knee replacement surgeries.

Rodriguez-Elizalde also works at OV Surgical and is one of three directors of the clinic.

The clinic offers surgeries for sports injuries and chronic joint pain and advertises private-pay surgeries to patients from other provinces who wish to “avoid lengthy public wait times” on its website.

Rodriguez-Elizalde said he thinks facilities like Schroeder will help immensely with capacity issues.

“If you look at things like cataract surgery, those are all traditionally done in the hospital. And now people go to clinics for that routinely,” he said. “You’d never think to go to the hospital to have a cataract surgery, you’d go to one of multiple clinics across the province.”

“I think it’s just getting our heads around the fact that hip and knee replacement can be outsourced and done in a community setting which offers more options to people who are either able to travel to these areas — assuming one day that there’s more of these everywhere — and also give people more options that are closer to home.”

There have been no updates on the exact progress toward licensing for the remaining two clinic groups: the Windsor Orthopedic Surgical Centre and the Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa.

The Ministry of Health said it is working with the remaining clinics to complete all the requirements needed for licensing, including mandatory pre-licensing inspections from Accreditation Canada.

When the Ford government passed Bill 60, the Your Health Act, in 2023 to allow more publicly covered medical procedures to be performed at private facilities, it prompted considerable backlash.

Natalie Mehra, the executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition (OHC), has led protests against the change, arguing that the government funding would be better spent on expanding health-care services in the existing public system.

“Obviously we would support an expansion in the number of surgeries being done, but it does actually matter who owns and operates our health care,” Mehra said. “In this case, the Ford government has opted to fund private clinics to take over services that were provided by public hospitals. It has chosen to fund private clinics as opposed to public hospitals.”

The OHC, and other advocacy groups, have warned that OHIP-covered procedures in private clinics could lead to staff poaching from the public system and some clinicians upselling patients for medically unnecessary surgeries. There are also concerns about private clinics having a greater concentration in more affluent, urban areas, giving certain regions better health-care access than others.

Mehra pointed to data from the OHC which showed that operating rooms and MRI machines are going unused on evenings and weekends at publicly funded facilities across the province due to lack of funding.

Earlier this week, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a report, titled “Not adding up.” It argued the Ford government’s funding for its for-profit surgical and medical imaging services is growing at a faster rate than its funding for the public system, while providing more expensive care and doing little to reduce wait times for eight of 12 priority procedures.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Health Minister Sylvia Jones said patients having more options for where to go for medical procedures gets them care faster and has shown progress in reducing wait times in the past.

“Our data has shown that, in fact, when we made the enhancement and expansion of cataract surgeries, particularly with three already existing community surgical centres in Windsor, in Kitchener-Waterloo and in Ottawa, that we have seen wait times decrease for cataract surgeries,” Jones said. “It’s not an either-or.”

Rodriguez-Elizalde said it helps to think about community clinics as simply a more recent part of “one system.”

“Everywhere is a health-care resource, depending on where you work. And getting the most out of that resource I think is important,” he said.

“If surgeons are able to pick up an extra day without leaving their quote-unquote daytime job at the hospital and in that day — we’re trying to run high-efficiency two-room models where you can do a lot of surgery — if they can do an extra 10 cases once a month at another centre on their day off, that adds to the capacity of the system.”

The Trillium attempted to contact the Windsor Surgical Centre and the Academic Orthopedic Surgical Associates of Ottawa but received no response by the time of publication.

Click here for the original article