We don’t really know how many health-care workers we have across the country. We have 13 completely different health-care systems, and we don’t have very effective health workforce data to understand trends like inflows and outflows. This raises many questions. Are we training enough medical professionals? Are we making the job attractive enough to retain the ones we have trained? When we bring professionals into our country, are they being effectively integrated into the health-care system?
We are in a pandemic and health-care workers are burnt out, and they are leaving because they’re unhappy with how things have been going. It’s a very challenging job and it’s not made any easier when it’s constantly in the crosshairs of austerity. The quick fix has been, “We’ll just import some more health-care workers, or we’ll just work short-handed,” and I think we’ve pushed it too far.
The main barrier is having their credentials recognized. The majority of health-care professions in Canada are regulated, meaning that there is usually some kind of body that controls licensing and recognition. Since the 1980s, the federal government has been providing funds to professional regulators to encourage them to streamline their systems. And now in Ontario, we have provincial fairness commissioners, or ombudsmen, who are overseeing the process of recognition for foreign-trained professionals, asking for it to be fair, transparent and objective, and that the fees charged are only enough to recover costs.