Primary Focus with Dr. Tara Kiran

Can you imagine driving down the highway and seeing street signs directing you to your local primary care clinic instead of a hospital? In this episode, Dr. Tara Kiran hops in a car with health economist Tino Marti for a healthcare road trip across Catalonia, Spain, to tour three different clinics. They serve different populations in different settings under different governance models. But all th...

Imagine living in a country where no resident struggles to access primary care. There are no wait lists. Everyone can be seen at the local health centre, even if they haven’t registered in advance. In this episode, Dr. Tara Kiran takes you on a journey to Spain—where the right to primary care is guaranteed in law and where every community has a local health centre. Walking through the streets and...

More than 5.8 million adults in Canada don't have a regular family doctor, nurse practitioner or primary care clinic--and where you live has a lot to do with whether you're one of them. To make sense of the newest research on primary care in Canada, Dr. Tara Kiran flips the script and welcomes award-winning health reporter Kelly Grant from The Globe and Mail to ask her the tough questions. Togethe...

In this episode, Dr. Tara Kiran travels to Durham, Ontario, to visit the Durham Community Health Centre, where CEO Francis Garwe leads a team rethinking what primary care can look like when it is truly rooted in community. Touring a repurposed public school that now houses a wide range of services—from mental health counseling and a regional diabetes team to food security programs, youth programmi...

In this episode, Dr. Tara Kiran travels to Vancouver, British Columbia, to visit the Umbrella Multicultural Health Co-op Clinic — a clinic built by and for newcomer communities. Umbrella pairs physicians and nurse practitioners with cross-cultural health brokers who act as language and cultural interpreters, helping bridge gaps not just in communication, but in navigating the healthcare system its...

In this episode, Tara speaks with Dr. Nicole Boutilier, Executive Vice President of Medicine and Clinical Operations at the Nova Scotia Health Authority —  a family doctor leading primary care transformation from within the government. Dr. Boutilier walks Tara through Nova Scotia’s multi-pronged plan to improve primary care access: transforming the province’s centralized waitlist into an active pa...

In Part Two of our Costa Rica series, Dr. Tara Kiran takes you inside an EBAIS (Equipos Básicos de Atención Integral de Salud) clinic on the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica to see what it actually looks like to deliver primary care beyond clinic walls. Costa Rica organizes primary care around geography. Each clinic is accountable for a defined population — and community health workers play a centra...

This episode is the first in a two-part series on the primary care system in Costa Rica. Dr. Tara Kiran sits down with Dr. Madeline Pesec , an internal medicine physician and pediatrician, to explore Costa Rica’s ambitious primary health care system. They talk about how Costa Rica's commitment to health as a human right and its community-oriented primary care have led to significant improvements i...

In this episode, we take you to Saint-Hyacinthe to see how a team in Quebec is transforming timely access to primary care. Quebec has more interprofessional primary care teams than anywhere else in Canada — yet it remains one of the provinces struggling most with access. So how do you turn a team into one that actually works? Dr. Kiran sits down with Dr. Isabelle Gaboury, a researcher and QI leade...

In this episode of Primary Focus , Dr. Tara Kiran travels to Renfrew County, Ontario, where an innovative team is tackling the family doctor shortage with a new kind of hybrid care - where your doctor is virtual, but your team is on-site. At the Petawawa Centennial Family Health Centre, Dr. Jonathan Fitzsimon shows Tara how patients are matched with virtual family physicians who work alongside loc...

This season, we’re diving into innovative primary care practices across Canada—starting in Alberta, where one family practice is making timely, high-quality care a reality for more than 25,000 patients within a fully capitated model. In this episode, Tara visits Crowfoot Family Practice in Calgary—a clinic that’s getting team-based care right. Physicians here manage patient panels about 30 percent...

As Canada faces a family doctor shortage, Tara calls up her friend Dr. Ruth Lavergne, a primary care researcher at Dalhousie University, to ask how we ended up an estimated 23,000 doctors short — despite training more in recent years. Together they explore how the work of family doctors has grown more complex, why more are choosing focused practice or shorter hours, and how payment reforms are sha...

In this special episode, host Dr. Tara Kiran reflects on the passage of Ontario’s new Primary Care Act—the first legislation of its kind in Canada. Joined by Peter MacLeod , founder of MASS LBP and co-lead of the OurCare initiative, Tara and Peter take you behind the scenes of a national public dialogue that helped shape the new law. Nearly 10,000 Canadians participated in the OurCare process and...

How do you design a system that delivers timely primary care — not by chance, but by design? In this final episode in the Netherlands, Tara visits a health insurance company and reflects with her travel companion, Rosemary Hannam on what stood out from their trip to the Netherlands. They discuss how features like standardized GP contracts, clear access guarantees, strong physician leadership and a...

Emergency departments in Canada are overcrowded — but what if they didn’t have to be? In Part Three of her audio documentary series from the Netherlands, Dr. Tara Kiran takes listeners behind the scenes at two Dutch after-hours clinics: one in the university town of Nijmegen, and another in bustling Amsterdam. She follows Dr. Tim Olde Hartman into a modern after-hours centre that serves over 400,0...

Why are Dutch GPs called “huisarts” — house doctors? In Part Two of her visit to a Nijmegen clinic, Dr. Tara Kiran talks with Dr. Suzanne Ligthart about the Dutch tradition of home visits. She then meets Kris Arts, a practice assistant, and learns how these highly trained team members serve as the doctor’s right hand — expertly triaging patients, coordinating follow-up, and keeping the clinic runn...

How is it that 99% of people in the Netherlands have access to primary care? How can Dutch doctors look after large numbers of patients while still providing primary care? Those are some of the questions Dr. Kiran is set on answering when she visits the Netherlands to learn more about their primary care system. In the first of this four part series, Dr. Kiran brings you with her as she visits a GP...

What if getting a family doctor was as simple as enrolling your child in your local public school? Dr. Rita McCracken joins Dr. Tara Kiran to explore what primary care can learn from public education. They unpack why healthcare access should be treated as a right, the structural barriers that keep primary care fragmented, and how shifting responsibility from individual doctors to community-based t...

Join Dr. Tara Kiran as she learns about how the Northern Connections Medical Centre in Winnipeg is revolutionizing primary care for Indigenous communities. Dr. Kiran tours the facility and interviews Dr. Mandy Buss , who highlights the clinic’s culturally inclusive and trauma-informed practices, and the critical need for increased Indigenous representation in the medical field. Through real-life s...

Join Dr. Tara Kiran as she explores just how bad the primary care crisis is in Canada and the history of exactly how we got here. To do that, she phones her friend (and boss), Dr. Danielle Martin , to dissect the foundational elements of Canada's healthcare system, discuss why the system is grappling with significant gaps, and to ask the thorny question of where accountability lies, and who exactl...

Why do 6.5 million people in Canada lack a family doctor or access to primary care—and what can be done about it? In this podcast, Dr. Tara Kiran unpacks the root causes of Canada’s primary care crisis and, more importantly, explores solutions. The podcast is centred on the OurCare Standard —six simple statements that define what every person in Canada should expect from the primary care system: 1...