I will be brief, Madam Chair.
I have three quick points. One, I was unfair to point out only the education and the regulatory bodies as culpable in my last comments. Government owns a lot of it too, in our legislative and regulatory frameworks, as do many parts of the system, so to move to a competency model will take major efforts by all parties, and a real intent has not been seen.
On the issue of teamwork, it is absolutely a big focus for our group. We actually have a specific committee, called the interprofessional committee, that has now been created to replace the physician committee and the nursing committee and the allied; however, the actual on-the-ground issues of how you compensate different people in different models and which areas of the health care system get picked for funding, whether it's primary care or specialist care, become jurisdictional issues.
In Ontario we did family health teams and anesthesia care teams. Other jurisdictions might pick cardiovascular surgery or emergency departments to focus their initiatives. As a framework it's data collection, principles, and sharing best practices; where there is a pan-Canadian approach, we do have a specific interprofessional committee.
The IMG transitional licence is something that I'm quite familiar with as a proposal. I don't know if time will allow me to fully go into it. There's a lot of complexity and patient safety issues, but we're finding a lot of other options for international medical graduates.
I would also say that international medical graduates in Ontario—you mentioned Ontario specifically—have gone from roughly 75 a year in training to over 200 new ones in training a year, and currently there are almost 1,000 international medical graduates in training a year. We've actually seen a decrease in the number of IMGs who need to be assessed for training. We used to process 1,000 a year; we're down to about 550 a year, so we're catching up.