Health committee  Thank you very much. Dr. Ouellet said that the debt level upon graduation definitely deters people who come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds from choosing a career in medicine. They cannot contemplate spending 10 years at university. Clearly this is a major barrier

Health committee  Thank you. I think everyone agrees that folks want to work together. But everyone is working at a breakneck pace. Because everyone is focusing on meeting the needs of patients, there's not enough time to really sit back and look at how we can improve the system and spend our do

Finance committee  Thank you very much. We are proposing to create a national institute to oversee the quality of research. There are many innovations in various parts of the country that are monitored with varying degrees of attention. Saskatchewan is a good example of a province where innovation

Finance committee  What we are considering is an institute that would allow us to truly exploit the research in areas where we are making a lot of headway. Good practices in place in a small town could be applied to the rest of the province or elsewhere in Canada. It is a question of making better

Health committee  Another example you can think of is the guidance of this government on extreme heat events. Working with the Public Health Agency, they developed some standards for alerts and interventions and advice for the population, and disseminated it at the municipal level. There are many

Human Resources committee  Thank you for giving me the privilege today to present certain perspectives of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. I will be focusing my comments on the 67 other specialties outside of family medicine. The College of Family Physicians of Canada may present at

Human Resources committee  Thank you. I think if we could match immigration policy with needs, we might create a better sense of expectation among those who are immigrating to Canada and the practice realities. Fitting it into practice is really a complex issue. It's not just the technical skills, it's

Human Resources committee  My observation is really to try to match our immigration policy with our needs, and to understand that whatever extra measures we do apply to provide opportunities for these internationally educated physicians to integrate into Canadian society...that we do not give them greater

Human Resources committee  Absolutely not. We have to be able to identify them, assess their basic skills, but recognize that we have to be able to modulate the intake into our workforce, because they become part of the production of our workforce, to match it with needs. So if you have enough cardiac surg

Human Resources committee  If you're thinking of redressing maldistribution in our rural communities and recognizing work-life balance as being key, I think a creative use of electronic care, where you could bridge a local clinician with a series of clinicians in some of the larger urban communities, so th

Human Resources committee  We'd probably have the solution to world peace if we could answer that question. Loan forgiveness may be a slight enabler, but it doesn't really inculcate in the future physician the desire to go work in those communities. We do know that exposure to these sites—and we look at t

Human Resources committee  The quality of international medical graduates varies greatly. A physician may have been trained in India in an excellent institution and may be ready for immediate integration, while someone else may have been trained 40 km from that location and may not have the same skills at

Human Resources committee  That is not really the case. I spend quite a bit of time in France trying to build bridges. People are interested in the Canadian system. Our competency framework interests them. Some medical faculties do not require students to take an exit exam. People complete their studies, f

Human Resources committee  That's right. There is no standardized exam in the country. Training standards are very, very different. They are now developing a standardized curriculum. There is currently no such thing. In Paris, cardiology training may be different from that provided 30 km away, in the same

Human Resources committee  There is currently some flexibility when it comes to that. If a dentist or a physician has full licensure, they can go anywhere in the country, and that is a good thing. However, that does not necessarily solve the distribution problem. If someone wants to practise in the suburbs