Windsor is in the mix as the Ford government takes the next step in its plan to expand the number of privately operated Ontario clinics offering publicly funded health care, Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced Monday.

Four centres, including one in Windsor, will start offering hip and knee replacements in the new year. The province is spending $125 million over two years to add up to 20,000 orthopedic surgeries at community clinics.

The government has already expanded the private delivery of public health care services for cataract procedures, as well as MRI and CT scans, and said that has involved 40,000 eye surgeries in the past year and tens of thousands of MRI and CT operating hours.

The expansion should ensure that 90 per cent of patients get those procedures within clinically recommended time frames, up from the current level of 80 per cent, Jones said.

Critics say the province should instead be putting that money into publicly funded hospitals, but Jones said it is not an either/or situation.

“What I see is an existing operation that has literally hundreds of surgical and diagnostic centres that are operating independently in our communities, where individuals, where patients have that convenience of not having to travel literally hours to get assessments, to get, in some cases, vital treatments and now, surgical (procedures),” she said at a press conference.

“When we do that, we actually preserve the capacity that we have in our acute care hospitals, and we’ll continue to make sure that our entire system is not only protected for individuals and patients who need those services, but also that we are building capacity.”