‘Shows how desperate the situation is:’ First-year medical students helping fill doctor-patient gap

First-year medical students at Toronto Metropolitan University are going into communities to help people get access to a family doctor. Kamil Karamali reports.

Talia Hassan, a first-year medical student at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), stands behind a table full of pamphlets and forms at the Sayeda Khadija Centre mosque as a young member of Mississauga, Ont.’s Muslim community shyly approaches her table, showing interest in the CPR manikin. Hassan helps guide her hands over the resuscitation manakin’s chest, teaching her how to apply pressure to the right area.

Hassan hopes it’s a lesson the young girl will keep with her for the rest of her life – in slowly chipping away at the larger and more daunting task of breaking down barriers for this under-served community.

“As someone who is from Mississauga, born and raised, I’ve definitely seen this need, going off of my grandparents who struggled to find good family doctors who have taken care of them in the Mississauga region, who speak their language, who are from where they’re from,” said Hassan in an interview conducted byTMU. “I think growing up, that’s always been a gap that we’re trying to fill.”

She’s one of a handful of TMU students who attended Friday prayers to try and connect members of the Muslim community, many of them newcomers to Canada, to a family doctor. Specifically focusing on bringing them into TMU’s Integrated Health Centre, where those in the Peel region can signing up for a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

“This is a community that is home to many immigrant and refugee populations that get overlooked by the system either because of financial issues, language issues, or are trying to navigate a system that they’re not used to,” said first-year medical student Adeeb Kutty.

“Many of them feel very hesitant to reach out and to get a family doctor. And that’s why, with the School of Medicine today, we are here doing outreach at a mosque, meeting people where they are, where they feel comfortable and just teaching them the most basic things about our system – how they can access family care so we can help build our trust earlier on.”

‘This is a very new thing’

For practicing physicians, the initiative is commendable and showcases how dire Canada’s doctor shortage situation is.

“I think it’s wonderful and full props to the medical students. I think it shows a lot of dedication to their community. I think it shows a lot of cultural insight,” said Dr. Sohail Gandhi, the former president of Ontario Medical Association (OMA) in a Zoom interview with CTV News Saturday.

“This is a very new thing, I’ve never heard of something like this. I think it shows just how desperate the situation is,” added Dr. Gandhi. “I think it shows just how much of a challenge we have in front of us, that medical students have taken it upon themselves to do this additional work to help their communities.”

Canada is facing a worsening family doctor shortage, with an estimated 5.7 to 6.5 million Canadians lacking access to a regular primary care provider, according to the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) – citing issues like population growth, aging demographics, physician burnout, administrative burden and declining interest in comprehensive family medicine.

In Ontario alone, the Ontario Medical Association reported in late 2025 that more than 2.5 million Ontarians do not have a family doctor, while 52 per cent of Ontario family physicians are considering retirement or planning to retire within the next five years, raising concerns about an even deeper access crisis ahead.

The Ontario College of Family Physicians projections suggest up to 4.4 million Ontarians could be without a family doctor by 2026 if trends continue. Ontario had promised that every Ontarian would be connected with a primary care provider by 2029 – investing $3.4 billion into its Primary Care Action Plan.

“I think right now, initiatives where we’re seeing people reaching out directly to patients who don’t have a family doctor are just so important. Especially when we’re looking at communities who have been underserved and perhaps don’t have as regular access to primary care as others,” said current OMA president Dr. Rebecca Hicks in an interview with CTV News Saturday, adding that there are roughly 2.5-million people in Ontario without access to a family doctor.

Governments and healthcare organizations have proposed reforms, including team-based care models, expanded nurse practitioner roles, faster licensing for internationally trained doctors, reduced administrative work and new physician compensation models.

‘Not a patient-friendly system’

On April 1, the Ontario Ministry of Health and OMA introduced a significant structural shift to the Family Health Organization (FHO) contract which brought several key changes designed to address some of those issues, like reducing administrative burdens and improving work-life balance.

“For the first time, we’re seeing funding actually for some of the administrative work that family doctors do. So, that’s a significant change in the way that the province is funding family medicine. We’re just in the first literal month and a half of this new program, so we’re still seeing how everything is rolling out,” said Dr. Hicks. “But we are hopeful that we’re going to see that the acknowledgment and funding for that behind-the-scenes work makes a difference.”

The bulk of those issues still persist across the country, according to Dr. Michael Rachlis, a public health physician and an adjunct professor at the Del Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Part of the solution is an integrated care system where there is a more streamlined partnership between healthcare, social care and community organizations that would coordinate services for each patient, he says.

“The problems are getting slightly worse because in the last few years we stopped, increasing our physician population greater than the population increase. So, it’s actually getting worse because it’s relatively fewer physicians,” said Dr. Rachlis.

“We’ve been talking about for 40 or 50 years, a stronger primary health care system with physicians working in teams, small patient friendly teams, nurses, social workers and others and, and administrators. we haven’t done that – so family doctors spend a lot of time trying to just find a specialist for their patients and it’s not a patient-friendly system,” said Dr. Rachlis.

“It’s based on the fact that in healthcare in Canada, we have really subcontracted out the organization of services to private practice physicians who are mainly not capable of organizing administratively what needs to be done,” added Dr. Rachlis.

According to Dr. Gandhi, part of the ongoing issue is that patients’ needs have grown more complex, which requires more time to assess. And there are a larger host of medical solutions out there.

“When I started practicing medicine, if someone had diabetes, I had Metformin and I had Glyburide. Right now we’ve got, just for diabetes, we have eight different classes of medicines before you get to insulin. And we’ve got five or six different classes of insulin on top of that, all of which have different side effects or better in different people for one reason or another,” said Dr. Gandhi.

“And it’s happened not just with diabetes, with that’s happened with high blood pressure, that’s happened with asthma, that’s happened with COPD, that’s happened with just about everything in the past 30 to 35 years. And so, the actual knowledge base has expanded so much that it makes it challenging to keep up. And there seems to be a lack of recognition of that playing a role in it.”

At the Sayeda Khadija Centre mosque, Hassan and her fellow students’ efforts have resulted in nearly 40 new families registering for their school’s health centre in connecting them with a health professional – in hopes their new doctors will have the capacity to support their needs.

“It’s definitely a struggle in the community, and it’s something that we need. So, it’s really important that we’re addressing that need,” added Hassan.