I am very happy to be here and to have this opportunity to talk about our review, our examination of the initiative.
We have just completed our mid-term program review, and it's a very detailed one. It gives us insights into how effective our allocation of resources and implementation projects have been. My colleague gave you some, but I'll give you a little bit more detail.
We know that the review tells us that the initiative has made inroads in creating conditions that enable aboriginal people not only to enter health career studies, but to succeed at them. We know from the review and some of the work we've done ourselves that many more aboriginal people have a much greater awareness of the educational requirements that are necessary if they're going to pursue health careers. This was a concern of ours when we went in, because we found many young aboriginal students approaching the end of high school and not realizing how important it was to do well in or even to study mathematics and sciences. We have done some outreach and we think that generation has a better understanding of what's required.
In addition, they're much more aware of the full range of health careers that are available to them, and they are more interested. Initially, the aboriginal students tended to gravitate towards nursing because it was nurses they saw in their communities, which is great, but now we have a much larger cohort of aboriginal students studying medicine, occupational therapy, x-ray technology, etc.
We've also started a number of bridging programs. We've helped universities and colleges develop bridging programs that help aboriginal students to qualify for entry into health studies. As you know, with some of the not so good rates of high school completion, particularly in the reserve communities, many of them are not able to qualify. We found that the bridging program model is a very good one.
I think one of the most important things we have funded, through the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Association of Faculties of Medicine, is the development of core competencies in a curriculum framework for undergraduate medical education. We think this has worked very well and will be implemented. We will continue to support it for this last year. This is to do two things. It's aimed at producing non-aboriginal practitioners who are more sensitive to and aware of cultural considerations to make them effective practitioners in those settings and with those patients, but also to provide a kind of curriculum that is relevant to aboriginal students. We think this is actually of benefit to the entire health system. Those are just a few of the things.
Another piece of work that we've done is to survey best practices for recruiting mature aboriginal students to medicine. It's a fact of life that in many cases you're not going to get these people before they are in fact mature and they have a lot of responsibilities. We've looked at what kinds of things appeal to them and what supports they need.