Thank you.
Absolutely, we do require significantly increased seats in post-secondary education, not just for physicians and nurses, but for the panoply of health providers. There are examples, for example, in my home province of Alberta, where the government identified a certain shortage of nurses when the vacancies for health science professionals, the people whom we represent, exceeded those in nursing. But the Alberta government said they were creating 200 more nursing seats in post-secondary education and 40 for the allied health professions. The focus needs to include all the health care providers, and we need the data from across the country to address that. Data among some of the disciplines we represent--some of which have small handfuls because they're so specialized, some of which have only several thousand--are lacking simply because of the size of these groups. But their presence or absence is key to providing all of the services that are in the health care system--the diagnostic testing, the therapeutic testing. So clearly we need to increase the seats.
When we have the seats, we need to ensure that they're effectively utilized, insofar as we have to make sure we select the students in such a way that we don't lose them from the limited seats. There is a problem with attrition in some training programs, so if you start with 20 students and only 10 graduate, you've lost that opportunity for 10 people. So the selection of students, the seats themselves--all of these need to be addressed.