Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
We did circulate a document that is my version of a PowerPoint presentation. I would ask you to perhaps follow along with me, because I'm going to refer to some data on it, and some of my comments may be a bit out of context unless you have it. If I may, I'll tell you as I move through the pages.
Once again, thank you very much for giving us this opportunity.
For those of you who don't know about the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, we represent the 17 Canadian faculties of medicine. We have a tripartite mission: educating the future physicians and scientists of this country; doing health research; and providing clinical care, particularly in our tertiary and quaternity care centres.
We are currently graduating over 2,300 physicians a year. We have more than 10,000 students studying to be physicians. We have 12,000 post-graduate trainees and, now, with our distributed campuses, we have 21,000 faculty across the country in full- and part-time positions. Canadian faculties of medicine receive $2.6 billion in health research.
As it states in my introduction slide, there is a significant alignment between the priorities of AFMC--and I've mentioned three strategic goals--and the standing committee's invitation and request to us to address issues of national HHR planning, innovative solutions, research and data collection, labour mobility, collaborative practice, and recruitment and retention. Within our five minutes, I'd like to touch on most of those.
The next slide says to you that we are on the same page. At our recent Deans on the Hill event, in which we met at least four or five of you around the table in one-on-one meetings, from all of your caucuses it became clear that the issue of HHR crosses all political boundaries, of all stripes. Regardless of the party or the person we interacted with, we heard clearly the message that this is a critical issue for the country, so we think we have the right group of people here to hear our observations.
We'll address four proposals very briefly.
I would ask you to go to the next slide, entitled “New Training Opportunities for Canadian International Medical Graduates”. This slide tells you that we have in our system 830 residents in training who are here on a visa. A visa resident is somebody who is not a Canadian; is not expected to stay in Canada; is supported by a sponsor, usually a sponsoring government; and is expected to return home. So that is a large number of trainees in a system which we're already currently expanding.
The next slide talks about international medical graduates. It gets a bit complicated, because an international medical graduate is somebody who is either a landed immigrant in Canada or a Canadian who studied medicine abroad and has returned here. So this is another cohort, of which, as you see, there are 1,387 who applied for training in Canada. We had capacity for 392.
So we have a relatively simple proposal, which we have spoken to some of you about in the past and which we want to reiterate. That is, we think it is time to modestly reduce the number of visa residents we have in our system and increase our capacity to take more international medical graduates. I know that all of you have constituents whose children are studying medicine abroad and want to return to Canada. They will be labelled an international medical graduate when they come back. This is a modest proposal to increase the capacity to take these sorts of students into our system.
However, visa residents come with a price tag. Faculties of medicine receive funding for visa residents. This is a proposal to replace 50 visa positions with international medical graduate positions funded by the federal government. We could fine-tune this proposal for you and suggest that that you may want to identify particular areas of need for those 50 positions. I think this could be a win-win opportunity on a small level.
The next slide is complicated and it is complicated for a purpose: to remind you that getting international medical graduates into practice in Canada is not a simple effort whatsoever. In fact, we have six major assessment centres across Canada assessing international medical graduates.
And yes, I know that many of you wonder why can't we take that physician when he or she arrives in the country and move them from a job outside of medicine into our operating rooms immediately. But there is a transition required, and this slide just reinforces for you the complexity of getting international medical graduates into practice.
The third one--