“Everybody deserves care.”
A simple concept is what prompted Dr. Matthew Donlan, pediatrician at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, to launch an initiative connecting children to doctors in their communities in Quebec.
Donlan had been struggling with patients leaving the emergency room with diagnoses like asthma and no followup care planned, often returning to the ER because of a lack of other options — a gap that persists across the province today.
“I felt like it was something that wasn’t right,” Donlan said.
To create the Care for Every Kid initiative, Donlan contacted “every pediatric office in Quebec” in 2022 to see if they were taking patients, then began managing consults at the hospital to match patients to pediatricians in their area. The project has since broadened to include primary care. As of 2025, all babies born at the McGill University Health Centre’s Royal Victoria Hospital are offered a family doctor close to home.
On the verge of launching an app to facilitate referrals, Donlan has another goal in mind: expansion. The project has already launched at another Montreal hospital and is in the works at others, but Donlan wants to sit down with Santé Québec. As the province works to reform its health-care system, he wants to be part of the discussion.
“I’ve been working hard to try to lobby the government to take a look at my project and see the value in it,” Donlan said. “My mission is that every kid in Quebec has access to the care that they need, whether it be a family doctor, pediatrician, or more complex care needs here at the hospital.”
A pediatric consult centre at the Montreal Children’s Hospital’s legacy site used to handle followups, but its funding was cut with the move to the Glen site, Donlan said. He attributed the change to a “governmental push” to move care that isn’t highly specialized out of the hospital and into the community.
“But what was happening is that all the kids that we used to refer to the pediatric consult centre didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said.
That translated to patients coming back to the Children’s, where physicians are supposed to be treating complex cases.
Dr. Bradley Osterman, a pediatric neurologist at the hospital, said he saw some of those patients before the Care for Every Kid initiative began: children who had neurological conditions that were manageable outside the hospital following the diagnosis, like certain types of epilepsy.
“Followup and subsequent renewal of the medication can easily be done by a primary care physician, especially in self-limited epilepsies or epilepsy conditions that will just self-resolve … after a few years in otherwise normal kids,” he said.
Even some of his patients with complex conditions would come to him for completely unrelated concerns, like attention deficit disorders, tics, sleep disorders or even reflux, because “often we were the only physician that they knew,” Osterman said.
“You sympathize with the families, especially when they’re coming to you under circumstances where it’s a little urgent.”
Now, Osterman is able to focus on complex neurological issues during his appointments, with other concerns handled by the appropriate health-care provider found through the program.
“This is a simple but extremely impactful initiative,” Osterman said.
When Donlan was getting the project off the ground, his calculations suggested there were enough pediatricians in Quebec to respond to the need. He explained about 30 per cent of children need to be seen by pediatricians for specific conditions, while the rest can be seen by primary care physicians.
For primary care, he found that 85 per cent of babies born at the Royal Victoria Hospital in 2022 had a family doctor by two months of age without help from the hospital, leaving just 15 per cent who needed help, which “felt like a very solvable problem, too.”
The project has connected more than 3,500 children with doctors since 2022, suggesting bureaucracy as the obstacle standing between these patients and access to primary and secondary care.
“This is a solvable problem,” Donlan said. “We just need to sit together and fix it.”
Having worked in community pediatrics for years, Donlan said he’s familiar with the trajectory of care and the ins and outs of wait lists at clinics and that they often seem long, “but when we tackled them at a granular level, they were actually pretty easy to solve.”
But the system needs to be improved, because as it stands, “every single physician’s office … has a complex wait list that is not well understood,” Donlan said.
Dr. Kim Anh Nguyen, head of pediatrics at St. Mary’s Hospital, which implemented the primary care aspect of Donlan’s initiative in May 2025, said patients can hit a wall when they call clinics themselves — even some of the ones to which the hospital now sends referrals for newborns.
“They’re told, ‘No, we can’t take you,’” she said. “The way we streamlined it with Dr. Donlan is: We send a request to certain clinics and the clinics call the patients back within two or three days and give them an appointment. After that, parents can decide whether to follow through, but at least everything has been set up.”
There had been an earlier attempt to provide explanations to parents on how to register for a doctor, but Nguyen said the process was complicated and delays were too long for babies, who need to be evaluated many times in quick succession after birth.
“When you have a newborn baby, you’re sleep-deprived, you’re given a ton of information — that’s not the moment when you’re able to go find a family doctor,” Nguyen said. “And in the end, who loses? The baby. It’s extremely unfair.”
At St. Mary’s, where approximately 3,500 babies are born every year, about 50 to 60 per cent of families were able to find doctors on their own before the project was launched, Nguyen said. She pointed out the gap with the Royal Vic’s 85 per cent, noting she wasn’t surprised.
“The population’s socioeconomic level is much lower. We have many single parents, many refugees, many parents who are also new immigrants,” she said. “We knew it was a population that was much more at risk of having fewer resources. … That’s where the importance of implementing this project really came from.”
Despite the fact that the targets were much higher at St. Mary’s, the hospital has managed to offer all babies a family doctor since May 2025, Nguyen said.
She added that she’s proud of the project and its success, but that there needs to be “government-level implementation.”
A communications adviser for CHU Ste-Justine confirmed the hospital is also in the process of evaluating Donlan’s project to help it reach its goal of providing “community-based followup to every patient who needs it.” (The hospital already matches patients to pediatricians when necessary.)
Donlan hasn’t been able to meet with Santé Québec yet, but he said he remains optimistic.
“I really need to advocate that this is something that is reproducible and economical and good for the population,” he said.
Santé Québec acknowledged an interview request about Donlan’s project from The Gazette on Tuesday last week, replying instead with a statement a week later.
“At this stage, information about this innovative project has been presented to us; however, it is too early to comment on any potential broader rollout at the (Quebec) level,” spokesperson Catherine Brousseau said in an email. “It should be noted that pilot projects of this kind undergo rigorous evaluation before being expanded, in order to ensure co-ordinated, high-quality care delivered by the right professional at the right time.”
Asked what he would do if given the opportunity to take his program across the province to improve access to care for children, Donlan didn’t hesitate. “I’d fix it in a month,” he said.
