Canadians need doctors. These strategies from around the country aim to find them

The Cure is a CBC News series examining strategies provinces and territories are using to tackle the primary care crisis.

Kristen Walsh pours over the journal she uses to log everything she can about managing her multiple chronic medical conditions without a family doctor.

Walsh, who lives in Conception Bay South, N.L., just outside St. John's, has ankylosing spondylitis, a rare type of arthritis, as well as polycystic kidney disease and ADHD.

She sees specialists for her kidney disease and arthritis, and sometimes visits nurse practitioners to help manage her conditions. But she says a family doctor would help see the whole picture.

"Because while everyone's kind of looking at their own individual piece of the puzzle, no one is putting all the pieces together to say, like, you're this person as a whole and these are all of your conditions and these are all the medications you're on."

Walsh is one of an estimated 6.5 million Canadians left navigating a strained health-care system by themselves, as the country's family doctor shortage reaches a crisis point. According to a 2025 Health Canada report analyzing the health-care workforce, the country is currently short 22,823 family physicians.

"That to me is a jaw-dropping number," said Dr. Joss Reimer, president of the Canadian Medical Association.

"We need to be doing everything that we can to increase those numbers of family physicians, but also trying to find other solutions."

There are strategies in place in every province and territory to find a remedy to the problem, from pumping cash into new physician payment models to opening new med schools and expanding scopes of practice for other health-care professionals.

A key strategy on the West Coast, where British Columbia estimates it needs 4,400 family physicians, is a new payment model.

The province introduced the longitudinal family practice model in February 2023, which changed how — and how much — family doctors were paid.

On average, the province says the model would boost a family physician's salary to $385,000 a year, up from roughly $250,000.

Dr. Rita McCracken, who's been practising family medicine for more than 16 years, says she's noticed an increase in her income since the model was introduced.

"So we now have an hourly pay that we get for both direct patient care and indirect patient care," said McCracken, also an assistant professor in the department of family practice at University of British Columbia. "And then we still get a per visit fee."