Dr. Matthew Donlan has a simple solution to a problem of Santé Québec’s own creation. He has found a way to pair children with pediatricians almost from birth, whereby families who need primary care for their babies can effectively bypass the Guichet d’accès à un médecin de famille (GAMF).
The Montreal West resident has been a pediatrician for nearly 15 years, with experience as a pediatric intensivist in Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, and Ottawa. “It really allowed me to understand the healthcare system from primary care all the way through to tertiary coronary care.”
A blind-spot of the GAMF, he says, is that babies do not get a RAMQ (Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec) number until about two months after birth, past the point where they should have had their first pediatric visit. Donlan says Santé Québec is working on it, “but historically children have been forgotten on the GAMF.”
As one-time head of the MCH (Montreal Children’s Hospital) Pediatric Consult Centre, Donlan observed that too many children with health issues were being sent home without proper follow up — patients who “easily could have gotten taken care of closer to their home.” They needed community-based primary care, Donlan says, but “we didn’t really have anywhere to send them. We weren’t really tapping into the resources, the capacity for community pediatrics.”
Donlan created a database of Quebec pediatricians. Based on the patients’ postal codes, he would be able to redirect them to pediatricians closer to their homes. It sounds elementary to those who grew up in a time when children had pediatricians from birth. But to those living through a time when nearly two million Quebecers do not have a family doctor, and up to 20 percent of babies do not have a pediatrician — and the GAMF wait time is upwards of three years — it sounds unreal.
“Historically, we had these titans of pediatrics in Montreal,” Donlan says, listing off names of well-known doctors that saw thousands of children in their practices. The current division of care, he says, is a lot less efficient. And Quebec has far more family physicians than pediatricians.
Between 2022 and 2025, as the precursor to what Donlan calls Care for All Kids, “we were up to 4,000-plus consults that we’ve rediverted to the community.” About four years ago, 50 to 60 per cent of babies leaving the MCH did not have a primary care physician. But when contacted just two months later, Donlan tells The Suburban, 85 per cent had access to primary care. “This didn’t feel unsolvable to me anymore.”
In 2024, he partnered with clinics in Centre-Ouest, sending babies born at the Royal Victoria Hospital to clinics in the area. That expanded the following year. “Now every single baby that’s born at the Vic is given the opportunity to have a family doctor before they go home.”
The goal is “to have Santé Québec and the government and family doctors recognize that babies do need to have primary care.” Last December the family doctors’ federation (FMOQ) signed an agreement to take on 500,000 new patients, removing them from the waiting list.
“I need to make sure that the kids aren’t forgotten,” he says. “I have a blueprint for success. I just need Santé Québec to reach out so I can show it to them. At our hospital alone I was able to save $7 million a year. It’s a very simple solution to what is thought to be a very complicated problem but is in reality a very solvable problem.” n