Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm Glenn Brimacombe. I'm president and CEO of the Association of Canadian Academic Healthcare Organizations. I'm joined today by Dr. Jack Kitts, who is the ACAHO board chair, and he's also president and CEO of the Ottawa Hospital.
ACAHO represents Canada's teaching and research hospitals, academic, provincial, and regional health authorities, and their research institutes. Our members are uniquely defined in terms of their publicly stated, integrated, tripartite missions of patient care, education and training, and research and innovation. This morning our remarks are focused on the issue of the supply mix and distribution of health providers and the role of the federal government in the context of the standing committee's study on health human resources.
Of the estimated 18,000 new graduates each year from medicine, nursing, and other professions and disciplines, most will have had at least one practicum in an ACAHO member organization. For students across all years of a multi-year clinical training program, ACAHO members provide 55,000 clinical placement and residency opportunities per year. These placements enable the transition from textbooks to the reality of human life and the provision of care. In many cases, these experiences shape the foundational practices and career decisions that will influence these individuals for a lifetime and the care their patients will receive.
In addition to sheer volume, however, these placements are also occurring in environments in which the research and innovation mandate allows world-class training experiences. With the co-location of research, ACAHO member organizations are more likely to be early adopters of innovation, resulting in the ability to take on complex health issues. For example, some ACAHO members have mandates to improve aboriginal health, the health of the vulnerable, complex, and aging populations, and to lead in the use of innovative health and information technologies to achieve efficiencies and improve system sustainability, while improving the quality of care, enhanced patient safety, and better health outcomes.
By virtue of the capacity resulting from the integration of patient care education and training and research innovation, ACAHO members provide a national resource by consolidating rare, expensive, and complex procedures to optimize outcomes and efficiencies, but also to minimize competition for scarce human resources and sub-specialty resources; by providing clinical mentorship to trainees who may become employees of other organizations, often in other provinces or parts of the country; and generate research and innovations that have no geographic boundary, which can be applied across the system and have a global impact.
While the policy issues related to health human resources and their supply mix and distribution are largely addressed at the provincial and territorial levels, ACAHO is of the view that there is a strong complementary and catalytic role for the federal government to play, given their constitutional responsibilities. To address the sustainability of the clinical training experience, the pre-budget submission of the 38 national associations that form the Health Action Lobby, which is known as HEAL, recommended that the federal government establish a five-year, time-limited, issue-specific, and strategically targeted national health human resource infrastructure fund. Such a fund would allow organizations to sustain and engage experienced clinicians in the training and mentorship of new trainees by providing funding for special initiatives to offset the direct cost of training providers and developing leaders, such as the cost of recruiting and supporting more community-based teachers and mentors, funding for the indirect or infrastructure costs associated with the educational enterprise, support for departments' education offices, and the materials and equipment necessary for clinical practice and practical training. The fund would also focus on the need for an overall data management system for specifying, tracking, forecasting, and costing of health human resource requirements in the face of evolving population health needs.
We would also recommend that it be complemented by the creation of a body, which some have termed an observatory, that would enable providers and policy makers to exchange, learn, and pilot widely implementable leading practices.
In closing, ACAHO believes that the federal government has a role in contributing in a complementary pan-Canadian fashion. It can do so by leveraging national resources to optimize the integration of patient care, education and training, and research and innovation, and by providing the infrastructure needed for evidence-informed management of the many health systems across our country.
Thank you.