Infant vaccinations as soon as I enter Canada

Hi,

We are planning to move to Canada on April 1, 2021. My son is going to be 1 year old in mid April (just as we finish 14 day quarantine). He will be due for some vaccines at 1 year mark. I was wondering what is my best option to get him vaccinated ? Find a family doctor from here ? Is there an easier way to get him vaccinated ?

We wont have provincial healthcare for first 3 months, so do family doctors accept private insurance ? If not, do we pay cash ? Any ideas about how expensive it would be ?

Thanks a lot in advance for the help !!!

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Why don’t you talk to your current pediatrician and see if they’ll vaccinate your child a few days before they turn 1.

The immunization doesn’t need to happen exactly on their first birthday, waiting a few months for it shouldn’t really be a big deal.

We spoke with current pediatrician, but since i quit my current job already, we don’t have insurance here. And also the pediatrician said no to early vaccines.

We need to put him in day care soon, so he would need vaccines, so can’t wait for too long.

I suppose this would depend on what province you’re going to in the first place. In BC, the family doctors don’t do any immunizations. This is instead managed by the Health Units by nurses.

The process of immunization for our child was that my wife first called them up, they then asked us to bring in the vaccination details from the US after a couple of weeks they scheduled some time and we were able to get the child immunized.

I’m not sure how this works in Ontario but perhaps some of our friends from there can shed some light on the process there.

The other thing about wait times to get onto provincial healthcare is also province dependent. I know Alberta has no wait times and Ontatio had also suspended wait times at the beginning of the Covid thing (not sure what the current status is).

All this said, I’d say that you should level set your expectations it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to waltz in and get your child immunized. It’ll take a bit of running around and getting things setup for the first time and will be much smoother going forward.

Thanks a lot for detailed reply. We are moving to Ontario. I will check what is provincial wait is right now. But anyway, he wont be covered as he is US citizen and not on PR right now. He was born after we activated PR. I am planning to apply for his PR after one year of waiting time there.

I hope someone from Ontario can give us some guidance as to how immunization is done there. Meanwhile I will start looking for family doctors over there who is accepting new patients. Seems like its a pretty tough job to find that.

There is no one year of waiting time for filing a PR application for your dependent child, and your child would be eligible for OHIP after you file their PR application.

See this thread for details about sponsoring a US born child - Baby born in US after soft landing

Oh okay. Thanks a lot Panditji. I will take a look.

Hi @mkpansare - are there any specific vaccines that are different from the US ?

Also, is your child a PR or on visa ? Does anyone in the group know if a child is eligible for OHIP if parents are PR, while the child is not ?

Not much. The vaccines are pretty much same (at least in Ontario). Do get a vaccination history from current doctor before you move here, that way you can show it to your doctor here and they can give whatever is necessary according to schedule here.

My kid is not on PR. He is US citizen so he is here with his passport (which is considered as visa, I guess). He is not eligible for OHIP just cause he is our child. Good thing is, you can apply for PR pretty much immediately when you come here. Also, you can get OHIP once you apply for PR and they acknowledge that you have valid grounds to get PR. You dont need to wait till you get PR. Check this link : https://www.ontario.ca/page/apply-ohip-and-get-health-card#section-2

Another thing to note is, I came from US, and was always worried about medical expenses when you visit doctor. Here, even without OHIP, healthcare is affordable. Each normal doctor visit is $50-$60. And without OHIP, vaccines are still covered by government, so you need to only pay for doctor visit, not actual vaccines. So that cost us just $60 for getting him 1 year vaccination. We had to visit doctor couple of times for regular cold and such, which was same as well. So you can easily get by till you get PR by just paying out of pocket. One more thing I was told by doctor’s office is, that I should hold on to all the receipts for those $50-60 visits, and I may be able to get reimbursed for those once my son gets PR. He still haven’t got it, so I cant say that is true for sure, but something I heard.

@mkpansare Thank you for this detailed response. Thanks again.