Thank you so much.
I was speaking to our future of medical education in Canada MD project, for which the eighth recommendation is to advance inter- and intra-professional practice. We have been implementing these recommendations—and this is an ongoing endeavour within our association—as they relate to our faculties.
The next project was on the future of medical education as it relates to postgraduate or residency education. Thanks to the generous support of Health Canada and in collaboration with our colleges, we came up with 10 recommendations, of which the first is to ensure the right mix, distribution, and number of physicians to meet societal needs. We see again within it the important consideration of potential changes in scope of practice, again to meet societal needs. One of the guiding principles of that project was to value, model, and integrate interprofessionalism and intra-professionalism into residency learning and practice. We feel that we are well on our way to integrating these concepts for both MD and residency education.
What is missing here, though, is a strategy for the physician in practice. We are looking to launch our future of medical education as it relates to continuing professional development. I see this as an area in which we can hopefully work together.
AFMC is addressing the scope of practice and skills training of health professionals in many ways. One that I want to highlight is that we have been asked to co-chair the physician resource planning task force, which is a task force that has been established by the committee for health work force at the request of the conference of deputy ministers of health.
The mandate is threefold. One is to develop a process of collaboration and coordination that addresses the imbalance in current physician supply and demand. The next is to lead the development of the pan-Canadian tool to better inform concerning physician supply as well as societal demand. The third is to create some relevant products that will help to provide accurate information to support decision-making by all of those who are considering a career in medicine, those who are in medical school in Canada, and those Canadians who are studying medicine outside of Canada, as well as those who are making decisions regarding residency choice and practice.
The AFMC is actually one of the leaders in the development of a career counselling data set that we hope will help those who have to be making decisions and those who are counselling those making decisions with regard to their future careers in medicine.
The AFMC really has a unique perspective here, because we are those who determine the future of our profession, in that we make decisions on admissions as well as the training of medical students and residents. Also, we are those who retrain members who are currently in practice and perhaps need retraining because of needs of remediation or a change in scope of practice.
Of course, all of this is done with the goal of improving patient care, and thus the recommendation of our association is that we see the federal government is uniquely positioned to take steps to become, in an ongoing manner, the facilitator of the alignment of those professions that are currently regulated, and to attempt to improve the regulation of the scope of practice across the provinces and territories.
We see that the federal government, based on the best evidence—we need to have as much data as we can to help inform our decisions—supports the increase of scope and practice in regulated health professions as appropriate, and again, depending on the practice environment, with the support and supervision of other members of the health care team, including physicians, to provide effective and efficient patient care. By efficient patient care I mean the right care to the right patient by the right regulated practitioner.
The final recommendation is that the federal government support the development of a national consultation on continuing professional development for physicians, with a focus of improved, patient-centred, interprofessional, team-based care.
Again, as a practitioner myself, as someone who has the opportunity of practising...every shift in the emergency occurs in an interprofessional practice mode. The importance of the nurse, of the paramedic, of the social worker, of the pharmacist, and the importance of that work happening in a team-based, patient-centred manner cannot be overemphasized.
As someone who is involved in the care of my elderly mother, who is currently in a long-term care facility, I again appreciate the importance of appropriate scope of practice, and potentially increased scope of practice for health care providers outside of medicine. Our faculties support this completely, and we hope to be a source of information in an ongoing dialogue with you on this matter.
Thank you.