Complaining About a Health Professional in Ontario

**Can:** investigate conduct and competence, require remedial education, impose terms or restrictions on practice, refer to a Discipline Committee, and suspend or revoke a certificate of registration. Complaints are free and you do not need a lawyer.

**Cannot:** award you compensation, order a refund, force an apology, or overturn a clinical decision. Those outcomes come from a civil claim, a fee dispute, or in some cases the institution itself.

You file a written complaint. The college notifies the practitioner, who responds, and an investigator gathers records. The matter then goes to the **Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee (ICRC)**, which decides the outcome — taking no action, issuing advice or a caution, requiring a specified continuing education programme, or referring to discipline.

Expect months rather than weeks. Serious allegations, particularly sexual abuse, follow expedited and much more consequential paths — Ontario's health professions legislation mandates revocation for defined sexual abuse findings, and funding for therapy may be available to the complainant.

Where the ICRC takes no action or you consider the investigation inadequate, you can request a review by the **Health Professions Appeal and Review Board**. HPARB examines whether the investigation was adequate and the decision reasonable, and can send the matter back to the college.

HPARB review is free and has a filing deadline stated in the ICRC's decision. It does not award compensation either, and it does not substitute its own finding of misconduct.

A civil negligence claim requires expert evidence that care fell below the standard of a reasonably competent practitioner **and** that this caused your injury. Causation is usually the hardest element, and these claims are expensive to run.

Start by requesting your complete records — you have a right of access under Ontario's health privacy legislation, and refusals can be taken to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Then get advice on the limitation period, which does **not** pause while a college complaint proceeds.

**An individual practitioner's conduct** → their college. **A hospital, clinic or system failure** → the facility's patient relations office, then Ontario's Patient Ombudsman. **Access to or privacy of your health records** → the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. **OHIP funding refusals** → HSARB. **Compensation for harm** → a civil claim.

Ontario has colleges for roughly thirty regulated health professions, including physicians, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, physiotherapists, massage therapists, psychologists, chiropractors, optometrists, dietitians, midwives, occupational therapists, denturists, dental hygienists, medical laboratory and radiation technologists, respiratory therapists, audiologists and speech-language pathologists, kinesiologists, and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Search the profession's name plus “College of” and “Ontario” to reach the right regulator.