Become a member of the Ontario Medical Association

We’ve got your back

OMA membership offers you a wide range of benefits to support your personal and professional well-being. It connects you to a diverse, inclusive community of fellow physicians and other professionals working together in providing the best possible patient care to the people of Ontario.

The OMA represents Ontario’s doctors and has been advocating on key issues affecting physicians for more than 140 years. In addition to ongoing negotiations for the Physicians Services Agreement with the government, the OMA works hard to strengthen the leadership role of doctors in caring for patients, ensuring that doctors remain the trusted voice in transforming Ontario’s health-care system. Today, the OMA serves more than 43,000 physicians including those who have retired, residents and medical students.

The OMA advocates for you

Two recent examples of how the OMA advocates for you, the physician, include:

1. Securing PPE for physicians during COVID-19

As COVID-19 began its relentless spread in early 2020, it quickly became clear that personal protective equipment (PPE) was going to be in short supply. Determined to help members experiencing shortages, the OMA became one of the few medical associations in Canada to secure and distribute donated PPE to physicians, free of charge.

OMA’s outreach, done in collaboration with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, led to donations from dentists, nurses, registered massage therapists and other regulated professions, as well as from estheticians, archivists and municipalities.

As PPE donations started to accumulate, it quickly became clear that the OMA needed to develop ethical guidelines for the allocation of PPE, an inventory to identify physicians’ needs, and storage and distribution capacity and launched the OMA PPE Inventory Tool. The PPE Inventory Tool collected 4,000 responses, representing 12,500 health-care workers and shared the data with Ontario Health regions and Ontario Health.

By late July, the OMA and its partners had distributed more than 500,000 masks, 10,000 face shields, 500 gowns and 1,000 litres of hand sanitizer to physicians’ offices across Ontario.

In addition, the Ontario Medical Foundation’s COVID-19 campaign raised $34,000 toward the purchase of PPE as well as donations of 50,000 masks, 24,000 bottles of disinfectant and 3,000 face shields. Many members who received donations said it helped them keep their practices open or safely reopen them.

2. Providing solutions and supports to physician burnout

Since March 2020, the OMA has been supporting physicians throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing physician burnout and providing supports such as the Physician Health Program and Disability Insurance. In the 2021 Member Value and Trust Tracking Survey among OMA Members in April 2021, perceived efficacy rates of the OMA in addressing burnout have increased significantly over the past year. The 11-point increase in the OMA’s perceived effectiveness in working to reduce the amount of burnout in Ontario’s doctors can be attributed to the creation of a  Burnout Task Force, as well as various tools and recommendations recently outlined in the white paper, “Healing the Healers: System-Level Solutions to Physician Burnout.”

Contact us

If you have any questions or need assistance, please email Membership Operations at membership@oma.org or call 1-800-268-7215.