QUEEN’S PARK—Northern Ontario residents who need to travel to access health care will soon receive more provincial assistance, starting this fall.
The Ontario government is investing $45 million over three years to expand the Northern Health Travel Grant.
The expansion was initially included in the 2024 Ontario budget Ontario Health Minister and Deputy Premier Sylvia Jones held a news conference in Thunder Bay last week to provide further details.
“We know that for too long patients in northern Ontario have faced unique challenges when accessing healthcare,” Minister Jones said during a visit to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. “Our investments to expand and enhance the Northern Health Travel Grant will ensure more people in Northern Ontario can connect to the specialized care they need when they need it.”
The Northern Health Travel Grant currently provides financial reimbursements that help cover the medical-related costs Northern Ontario residents can incur when travelling to access OHIP-insured health care services that are not available within a 100-kilometre radius of where they live. These include specialist visits and some diagnostic services.
The changes to the program include: The introduction of an online application process that includes digital receipt submissions for faster reimbursement; adding more eligible health care providers and facility locations; increasing the accommodation allowance from $100 to $175 per night; reducing the travel distance requirement to be eligible for the overnight accommodation allowance from 200 km to 100 km; and increasing the total allowance for eight or more nights from $550 to $1,150.
Minister Jones added that the grant is just one piece of the provincial health care system, and asserted that the province is working to increase the system’s capacity province-wide.
“Fifty hospitals are, right now, in the process of being built new, renovated or expanded,” Minister Jones said. “That is a capital piece that ensures that we will have over 3,000 more hospital beds across Ontario.”
“When we do that, of course, we need more health human resources,” said the health minister. “So, we are expanding and we have expanded access to school in Northern Ontario, southern Ontario. I’m particularly proud of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. We’ve had over 100 new seats available for physicians who want to train in Northern Ontario and 60 percent of those are for primary care family docs. We know that when people train in communities, they tend to stay in those communities.”
A full list of changes to the Northern Health Travel Grant is available online at Ontario.ca.
