Madam Chair, thank you.
I had covered one of the areas, which was the repository. I was about to tell you about the second step that an international medical graduate can take before coming into Canada, which is the Medical Council's evaluating examination.
Since 2008 we have gone to a computer-based examination, which is now delivered in 500 sites in over 70 countries and offered six times a year. The important part about this examination is that we do know from our data that those candidates who fail the examination one or more times have a low probability of actually completing the licensing process. We believe the federal government would benefit by requiring potential licensure applicants to provide evaluating examination results for consideration with immigration applications.
A third successful joint project has been the development of a national assessment collaboration. This collaboration is in response to recommendation 2b in the Health Canada-supported IMG task force report of 2004. The national assessment collaboration is a partnership of national medical organizations; provincial and territorial governments; provincial, international, and medical graduate assessment programs; and Health Canada. We now have established the ability to deliver a single, new, nationally recognized clinical examination to assess international medical graduates applying for residency positions. A governance structure has been negotiated and will reside within the Medical Council. The examination is centrally coordinated but delivered regionally through the seven existing international medical graduate assessment programs. Three centres are now participating in a proof of concept for 2010.
Fourth is the council's collaboration with the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities and the individual regulatory authorities on an application to HRSDC for funding under the foreign credentials recognition program. Building on the success of the physician credentials registry, we plan to develop a web-based national registration process. This will provide international medical graduates, and in fact all physicians, with a single portal where an application to any of the 13 regulatory jurisdictions can be electronically populated from the existing document repository.
We look forward to continuing these collaborative efforts, which I am convinced will provide a fairer and more transparent licensing process for all physicians in Canada and improve the integration of international medical graduates into the Canadian medical system.
Thank you.