Family Physicians Stopping Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ontario, Canada

As undergraduates who are studying global primary care delivery, we are particularly interested in your research into how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the exit of practicing physicians in Ontario. COVID-19 impacted access to healthcare throughout the world. Therefore, studies such as yours provide great insight into how the pandemic impacted patients and physicians over time.

In reviewing your findings, we noted that about twice as many physicians stopped working in 2020 compared to previous years. The average age of these physicians was relatively high, so you concluded that retirement was a likely cause. Regardless of cause, this still had a substantial impact by potentially detaching around 170,000 patients throughout Ontario. Does your team plan to conduct additional research to determine more clearly why twice as many physicians retired during the pandemic than usual. Furthermore, we would like to know if any physicians returned to practice once they received the COVID-19 vaccine, or after COVID-19 cases began to decline in the province. Additionally, we would like to see what this research would look like repeated for 2021-2022. Was 2020 unique regarding early retirement for physicians, or did the trend continue in the following years?

The results of your study showed that physicians aged 75 years and older had fewer primary care visits than younger physicians. Are we correct in assuming that the reason many physicians >= 75 years saw less patients was because they were at a greater risk for death from COVID-19 compared to younger physicians?