(September 28 2023)<\/p>\n
By: Tyler Fleming, CTV News<\/p>\n
It is something<\/span>\u00a0that thousands of people in the city of Ottawa need but don\u2019t have, access to regular medical care. While a new clinic in the south end is offering just that, along with fast service and no wait times, it comes with a yearly membership fee.<\/p>\n <\/span>The South Keys<\/span> Health Center, located at Bank Street and Hunt Club Road, is set to open next week and clinic officials say thousands of potential members are already on the waiting list, ready to pay $400 per person a year for access.<\/p>\n <\/span>“It’s called rapid<\/span> access and it’s perfectly legal,” clinical director Osman Nur says. “Nurse practitioners are the ones seeing you. They can do prescriptions, they can do a lot of health information, they can send you to a specialist.”<\/p>\n <\/span>While there will<\/span>\u00a0be doctors at the clinic practising family medicine, those who pay the membership fee will not have access to their services.<\/p>\n <\/span>Under provincial health<\/span>\u00a0laws, it is illegal for doctors to charge a fee for services that are covered by OHIP, but nurse practitioners do not fall under this purview. Nur says with the clinic about to open, their clinic is filling a gap in the medical system due to a lack of family doctors.<\/p>\n <\/span>“We have about<\/span>\u00a010,000 people on the wait list,” Nur says. “This is nurse-led, not medical doctors. You call us and you see us right away.”<\/p>\n <\/span>The clinic also<\/span>\u00a0offers other services such as a pharmacy, chiropractic, physio and massage therapies, which are not always covered by OHIP.<\/p>\n <\/span>“We\u2019re seeing examples<\/span>\u00a0of kind of a combination clinics,\u00a0where certain services are clearly not insured and outside but they are being combined with professionals and doctors and nurse practitioners that are provided covered care for insured and covered services. But if they are physically in the same space, even housed in the same clinic, I think this raises very serious concerns about conflicts of interests,”\u00a0says Kevin Skerrett, with the Ottawa Health Coalition.<\/p>\n <\/span>“It\u2019s a source<\/span>\u00a0of real concern for people who advocate for our health system. We have seen with delisting of insured services, with experimentation, with more and more private clinics that are straddling the line between public health care and services that are not provided and\u00a0people are seizing on this opportunity to bend the rules, if not break the rules and there are rules. There are strict legal perimeters that say you can\u2019t be charging patients for insured health services\u00a0in this country and in this province.”<\/p>\n <\/span>Skerrett says the<\/span>\u00a0provincial government must provide more funding to adequately support the need for more family doctors in order to prevent a tiered, American-style medical system from emerging.<\/p>\n <\/span>CTV News Ottawa<\/span>\u00a0reached out to Ontario’s Ministry of Health about the clinic. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Minister of Health suggested the ministry may investigate and that it\u00a0reviews all possible violations that come to its attention and ensure that all OHIP-insured patients who are charged for an insured service are reimbursed in full.<\/p>\n