Thank you for the opportunity to present the work of the Canadian Resident Matching Service to the Standing Committee on Health.
The Canadian Resident Matching Service is the access point to postgraduate medical education in Canada. All applicants, whether they're internationally trained or Canadian trained, must enter at the first level, which is PTY1, and CaRMS is the doorway into that process. It's an electronic application process, it's a matching service, and, of course, it's a data repository.
We've been serving the needs of international medical graduates for as long as the organization has existed, which is since 1970. We're not-for-profit. We really sit in the middle of the medical education community.
The goal of the electronic application and matching service is to have a completely transparent, fair, and accessible system. It is often misunderstood, but the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada sets the criteria for ranking in our selection system, not the match itself. The match only offers the process.
Since 2006, when the Association of Faculties of Medicine changed their policy and opened up the matching and selection process to international medical graduates, we have been able to witness an incredible increase in the number of international medical graduates who are attempting to enter the postgraduate medical education system in Canada. I'll give you an example.
In 2003, there were approximately 600 internationally trained medical graduates who would register every year for an opportunity to have access to our postgraduate system, but after the change in policy, we now see between 1,600 and 2,000 who register each year to be matched somewhere in Canada for postgraduate training. I think these numbers will mean something to you and have some consistency, and I think we can begin to depend on them.
Since 2008, CaRMS has sponsored an annual international medical graduate information symposium. We partner with other sister medical organizations, and with the assistance from the Ministry of Health in Ontario, we have been able to offer workshops and seminars to more than 400 international medical graduates to try to help them understand the system, the timing, and how to negotiate entering medicine in Canada. Feedback from both internationally trained physicians and workshop organizers reinforces how valuable this symposium has been to all attendees.
Since 2000, CaRMS has also identified a subset of international medical graduates, who are Canadians studying abroad. We define them as Canadian citizens or permanent residents who were legally in Canada prior to getting a medical education, whereas international medical graduates have traditionally been people who became Canadian citizens or landed immigrants after obtaining a medical education somewhere in the world. We see this other subset as those who started out with Canadian status, and then went abroad to get a medical education. Through a grant from Health Canada we have been researching this particular group of Canadian students who elect to study medicine in more than 25 countries around the world.
Now I want to go back to numbers, if I may. As I told you, since 2006 we have seen a consistent number of international medical graduates registering each year, consistent at somewhere between 1,600 and 2,000, but about 50% of that number are those who have been coming back each year. They were not successful the year before, or the year before that, so they're recycling, in a way, through the matching process, and 50% are new to the system each year. Again, that number is now quite consistent. So about 800 each year have never been in the match before, have just written their exams, and are new in attempting to enter the postgraduate system.
There's a final piece of information I want to share with you. In 2008, this group of Canadians studying abroad represented 24% of this new cohort; in 2009, they were 31% of this new cohort; and this year, because we're now in the match of 2010, they are as high as 40% of new internationally trained medical graduates entering or attempting to enter our system.
This subset of international medical graduates is a growing proportion of the international medical graduates who are attempting to attain licensure in Canada.