A new report suggests that as far as cutting waiting time in health care is concerned, much more focus is needed to access the family doctors and how they run their practices.

The College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Canadian Medical Association joined forces in 2007 to form the Primary Care Wait Time Partnership, and they released a report on Wednesday calling for more timely access to health care.

Wait-time discussion mostly focuses on the time it takes to get a specialized treatment or test, but the coalition group says that the clock really starts ticking from when the patient schedules a visit to a family doctor, if they have one.

"For the Canadian Medical Association, the issue of patients waiting for high-quality frontline medical care is one of the most serious issues facing Canada's health-care system," Dr. Anne Doig, CMA president, said in teleconference releasing the report. "We believe that every Canadian should have a family doctor."

To encourage the number of family doctors, many more medical students need to be motivated to choose family medicine providing much more opportunities so that doctors trained abroad can be licensed in Canada faster.