Our Mission, Vision and Strategic Plan

About our 2025-2028 Strategic Plan

The 2025 Primary Care Act recognizes that primary care is the foundation of Ontario’s publicly-funded health care system. As our Province takes a leadership role towards universal primary care for Ontarians, the Hamilton Family Health team is fully committed to do our part, with our partners in the Greater Hamilton Health Network (Ontario Health Team) Primary Care Network, to achieve this goal for our communities.

Our new vision: “Leading the way to a healthier community through team-based primary health care.”

Community health is bigger than just your doctor or family health team. It also means having a sense of belonging in your neighbourhood, clean air to breathe, food to eat, affordable housing, child and elder care, access to the health care you need close to home, and so much more.

This is why we’re building relationships with other health care and social service organisations across our community – working together with our partners to provide you with care, support, and meaningful connections.

Our refreshed mission: “To provide accessible, comprehensive and collaborative primary health care to acheive the best possible health and quality of life for our community.”

Our mission has been in place since our organisation’s founding in 2006, with one minor adjustment. In our new strategic plan, we replaced the word “excellent” with “accessible.”

Accessible primary health care: Primary care will often be your first point of contact into the health system. In line with Ontario’s “right care at the right time” approach, we’re working towards bringing that care close to home and making it easy and timely to access.

Comprehensive primary health care: Your primary care team will work with you to address a broad range of your health needs – from disease prevention and health promotion to treatment and rehabilitation.

Collaborative primary health care: Your primary care team involves many different professionals with unique specializations – from your family doctor to your nurse, physiotherapist, pharmacist, registered dietitian, respiratory educator, community outreach coordinator, psychiatrist, or mental health counsellor – we all work together to provide you with collaborative care and connect you to other services when you need them.

Our new strategic priorities:

Leading and revitalizing primary health care

Our goal is to move beyond one clinic, one provider – we envision a network of service providers where you’re easily connected to care and support that meets your needs across your lifetime. Where possible, we’re also aiming to provide you with primary health care within your home community.

Grow teams and team capacity

We’re working to ensure we have the resources we need to provide the best possible care for you and your family. That may mean:

• Hiring more interprofessional team members to work with your physician or Nurse Practitioner.
• Implementing digital tools so your doctor and primary care team can spend more time caring for you and less time doing paperwork.
• Partnering with other services across our community to integrate care into your primary care team (e.g., specialist services or home care).

With partners, attach and ensure equitable access to team-based primary care in all communities

We are working towards the goal set out in Ontario’s Primary Care Action Plan: by 2029, ensuring all people within Hamilton and surrounding area are attached to a primary care provider and team. While you’re waiting to be connected, we’re also finding ways to ensure those without prior access to primary care can still access some services, like our public, free health education groups and workshops.

Increase access to and better use of data to improve patient outcomes

Comprehensive data is key for helping us identify gaps and connect more people to team-based primary care. Working with our local health system partners, we’re responsibly collecting data to help us track major population health trends, including which neighbourhoods have higher rates of community members with no family doctor or health team.