Neighbourhood Health Homes: What Kingston's Model Means for Patient Access

Ontario is testing a quietly radical idea: primary care organized like public schools, where your neighbourhood determines your care team. The flagship is Kingston's Midtown Health Home (initially the Periwinkle model site), a partnership between Kingston Community Health Centres and the Frontenac, Lennox & Addington Ontario Health Team, funded by Ontario Health with over $4 million to connect up to 10,000 people to team-based care.

How the catchment model works

The FLA-OHT divides its region into neighbourhood zones using maps, health data, and local input. Residents register with Health Care Connect and are attached to the Health Home serving their postal code — Midtown began with K7M and K7L, clearing multi-year wait-lists neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Each family physician pairs with a nurse practitioner, with cross-coverage so someone is always available for urgent concerns. Dr. Jane Philpott, who champions the model and now chairs Ontario's Primary Care Action Team, describes the goal plainly: nobody loses care because a doctor retires, just as no student loses schooling when a teacher quits. Similar neighbourhood-based approaches are emerging in other regions, including communities in the Southlake area.

Why access infrastructure decides whether it scales

A catchment model multiplies the operational load: rostering thousands of new patients quickly, offering appointments to unattached neighbours who don't meet rostering criteria yet, and coordinating a multidisciplinary team across streams of care. Kingston's Health Home committed to online appointment booking from the start — because attachment at population scale cannot run through a phone line.

What Health Homes need from booking

Four things, in our experience running regional access programs: geography-aware intake (postal-code eligibility built into booking rules); attachment streams (meet-and-greets for newly rostered patients alongside episodic access for the not-yet-attached); equity by default (all languages, caregiver booking, no health-card barriers — the neighbourhoods with the greatest need are often the most multilingual); and regional reporting so OHTs can see attachment progress zone by zone.

The bigger picture

With the Primary Care Action Plan targeting universal attachment by 2029, the Health Home framework is likely coming to more regions. Clinics and OHTs that build access infrastructure now — one front door, coordinated intake, booking for every patient — will be the ones ready when their neighbourhood's turn arrives.

Sources & further reading

• FLA OHT — About Health Homes
• FLA OHT — Dr. Jane Philpott leverages the FLA OHT Health Home model
• Ontario — Primary Care Action Plan: 1-year progress update
• Kingston Daily — Midtown Kingston Health Home opens ($4.1M investment)