• Tara Kiran, Michael E Green, C Fangyun Wu, Alexander Kopp, Lidija Latifovic, Eliot Frymire, Rahim Moineddin, and Richard H Glazier.
• Department of Family and Community Medicine, St Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada tara.kiran@utoronto.ca.
• Ann Fam Med. 2022 Sep 1; 20 (5): 460463460-463.

AbstractWe conducted 2 analyses using administrative data to understand whether more family physicians in Ontario, Canada stopped working during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with previous years. First, we found 3.1% of physicians working in 2019 (n = 385/12,247) reported no billings in the first 6 months of the pandemic; compared with other family physicians, a higher portion were aged 75 years or older (13.0% vs 3.4%, P <0.001), had fee-for-service reimbursement (37.7% vs 24.9%, P <0.001), and had a panel size under 500 patients (40.0% vs 25.8%, P <0.001). Second, a fitted regression line found the absolute increase in the percentage of family physicians stopping work was 0.03% per year from 2010 to 2019 (P = 0.042) but 1.2% between 2019 to 2020 (P <0.001). More research is needed to understand the impact of physicians stopping work on primary care attachment and access to care.© 2022 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.

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