Supporting Access to Care for Newcomers, Immigrants & New Canadians

Canada welcomes hundreds of thousands of newcomers every year, and Ontario receives the largest share. Almost all of them will need a family doctor; many will wait years to get one. In the meantime, three walls stand between a newcomer and primary care: language, health-card status, and the sheer difficulty of navigating an unfamiliar system.

The three walls

Language. A booking line that operates in English during business hours is, for many families, functionally closed. Provincial standards require English and French — but Ontario's newest residents speak Mandarin, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Arabic, Tagalog, and dozens of other languages at home. When the front door only speaks two languages, the rest of the community gets filtered out before care even begins.

Health-card status. New permanent residents face waiting periods, refugee claimants navigate interim federal coverage, and temporary workers and international students often fall between programs. Booking systems that require a valid OHIP number as a hard gate turn an administrative status into a barrier to care.

Navigation. Which clinic takes new patients? What's a walk-in versus a family practice? What is Health Care Connect? Newcomers are asked to solve a system-design puzzle in their first months in the country, usually while working, settling children into schools, and managing everything else at once.

What Ontario's health teams are doing

Ontario Health Teams have started treating newcomer access as core work rather than an afterthought. The Ottawa Health Team – Équipe Santé Ottawa is designing community outreach and screening initiatives specifically so more newcomers and racialized community members can access breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening — including people without regular access to primary care. In Hamilton, Hamilton Urban Core Community Health Centre runs a Specialised Refugee Transition Clinic for refugees with complex health needs, prioritizing chronic illness, disability, mental health, and social determinants. And when the Windsor-Essex OHT was approved, its co-chairs named the temporary foreign worker community — thousands of agricultural workers in Essex County — among the first populations it would serve.

What booking infrastructure can do

Empower Health's position on this is simple and it's built into the product: every patient books. That means the patient booking experience runs in all languages, not just English and French — we've deployed multilingual booking (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi, and French) for regional programs where equitable access was a contract requirement, not a nice-to-have. It means patients with or without a health card can book, so coverage gaps don't become care gaps. And it means family and caregiver booking, because in many newcomer households one person books for three generations.

None of this replaces settlement workers, interpreters, or community health centres — it makes their work go further. When the front door is open in every language, around the clock, without a health-card gate, the community outreach that OHTs are investing in actually converts into booked appointments.

Sources & further reading

• Ottawa Health Team – ÉSO — newcomer & racialized community screening outreach
• Hamilton Urban Core CHC — Specialised Refugee Transition Clinic
• County of Essex — Windsor-Essex OHT approval (temporary foreign worker focus)
• Ontario's Primary Care Action Plan (January 2025)