Addressing current, emerging labour demands in health care

Mississauga – In recent years Canada’s health care workers have been challenged like never before and this has led to unprecedented levels of burnout, absences, and turnover. These workforce challenges are not only affecting the hard-working health workers we rely on, they’re also affecting patients who are experiencing long wait times for surgeries, emergency room closures, and difficulty accessing family health services. We know that without a sustainable, efficient, and resilient health workforce, Canadians cannot access and receive the quality care they need, when and where they need it.

Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Health, on behalf of Carla Qualtrough, Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, announced that the Government of Canada is investing $78.5 million in three projects that will help to train and retain more health care workers, under the Sectoral Workforce Solutions Program.
This announcement advances the Government of Canada’s support for a more sustainable health workforce, with a focus on better data to support workforce planning, and tools to support better retention and recruitment of health workers in Canada.

This was one of the shared health priorities as agreed to by the Canadian government and provinces and territories, outlined in the Working Together to Improve Health Care for Canadians Plan. This plan was supported through a Budget 2023 commitment of close to $200 billion over 10 years, including $46.2 billion in new funding to provinces and territories, to improve health care services for Canadians. As part of these agreements, provinces and territories are also being asked to streamline foreign credential recognition for internationally educated health professionals, and to advance labour mobility, starting with multi-jurisdictional credential recognition for key health professionals.

As a complement to this investment, the Medical Council of Canada is receiving $28.8 million for their project, Modernizing Mandatory Physician Activities Enabling Safe Patient Care, which aims to enhance patient care by developing a competency assessment framework for international medical graduates, creating a National Registry of Physicians, and modernizing the examination process for licensing physicians.

The National Registry of Physicians will serve as the first nationally integrated list of data on physicians in Canada. This registry will allow for improved collaboration across jurisdictions by housing valuable physician data in a centralized location, while helping to support the mobility of physicians to areas where the need is greatest, ensuring that Canadians can receive the highest level of medical care. By 2024, 70% of physicians in Canada are expected to have registered in the National Registry.

The Foundation for Advancing Family Medicine, the research arm of the College of Family Physicians of Canada, will also be receiving an investment of $45.3 million for their project, Team Primary Care: Training for Transformation. This project will support the training of health care practitioners—such as family physicians, physician assistants, family practice nurses, pharmacists, Indigenous traditional healers, midwives, and medical laboratory technologists—to practice team-based comprehensive primary care. The training and tools developed by this project will support practitioners in working together, by identifying types of work and making the most of available skills. It will help reduce critical labour shortages, improve the ability of workers to move to new locations, and make it easier to hire Indigenous practitioners and internationally educated health professionals. Approximately 5,000 primary care professionals, trainees and clinical preceptors will participate in this project, creating a model for team-based care that can be scaled across Canada. Additional capacity and expanded team-based care will enable more Canadians—including Indigenous people and those living in rural settings—to have access to comprehensive primary care.

In addition, the Canadian Alliance of Medical Laboratory Professionals Regulators is receiving $4.4 million in funding for their project, Micro-Credentials and Work Integration Supports in the Medical Laboratory Technology Profession, which will address labour shortages for medical laboratory technologists (MLTs) by helping science degree holders and internationally educated MLTs to enter the Canadian workforce. This project will modernize the assessment process for internationally educated MLTs and create an online simulation of the Canadian laboratory environment to help applicants improve their soft skills.