Southlake's Neighbourhood Health Home: How the NYSS OHT Is Bringing Care Closer to Home

When two Ontario Health Teams — Southlake Community OHT and South Simcoe OHT — merged to form the Northern York South Simcoe OHT (NYSS OHT), the logic was simple: their communities overlap, their populations are growing fast, and neither wanted geography to decide who gets a family doctor. The Southlake Community OHT had been operational since 2020 as part of Ontario's first cohort, and the combined team inherited a clear mandate — bring care closer to home for one of the fastest-growing regions in the province.

A network of neighbourhood clinics

The NYSS OHT has been opening primary care access points where the population actually lives: a Family Medicine Clinic in Aurora, a primary care clinic on Mulock Drive in Newmarket, and a clinic in Keswick — each staffed by family doctors and nurse practitioners providing comprehensive assessment, diagnosis and treatment, and each aimed squarely at residents without a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

In Georgina, the OHT partnered with the Georgina Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinic and Southlake to open a Nurse Practitioner-Led Children's Care Clinic serving children and youth from six months to 18 years — no referral required, with appointments made through a central booking system. It's a neighbourhood health home in miniature: local, team-based, and designed so families can get in without navigating gatekeepers.

Attachment at provincial scale

In May 2026, the province funded an expansion of the Southlake Academic Family Health Team under the Primary Care Action Plan — one of 124 teams funded in that round, collectively expected to connect another 500,000 patients across Ontario. Ontario has already exceeded its 2025–26 goal of connecting 300,000 patients by March 31, 2026, and the NYSS OHT's co-chairs framed the local expansion as exactly what it is: more connected, team-based care for Newmarket and Aurora residents, closer to home.

The Distributed Health Network

Southlake Health's longer-term play goes further: a Distributed Health Network with community-based Advanced Care Centres — starting in Georgina under a tripartite agreement between the Town, Southlake Health, and the NYSS OHT — co-locating interprofessional primary care, diagnostics, and outpatient clinics outside hospital walls, alongside a planned new hospital in East Gwillimbury. The design principle running through all of it is the same one behind the FLA OHT's Health Home model: assign care by neighbourhood, staff it with teams, and make the front door easy to walk through.

Why the front door matters

Every one of these access points — new clinics, children's clinics, satellite sites — concentrates newly attached patients onto team-based schedules. That's precisely where EMR-integrated online booking earns its keep: meet-and-greet intake for new rosters, caregiver booking for parents managing kids' appointments, load-balancing across physicians and nurse practitioners, and same-day release rules that keep urgent capacity open. A neighbourhood health home works when the neighbourhood can actually book into it — online, in their language, at 11 p.m. — instead of waiting for the phone lines to open.

Sources & further reading

• NYSS OHT — Home
• NYSS OHT — About (Southlake Community OHT history)
• NYSS OHT — Primary Care Clinics (Newmarket, Aurora, Keswick)
• NYSS OHT News — Georgina NP-Led Children's Care Clinic; OHT merger
• Ontario connecting more people to primary care in York Region (May 2026)
• Canadian Healthcare Technology — Southlake's Distributed Health Network