Thank you very much, and thank you for the opportunity to represent some of the information we gave you on December 9 and to give you a bit of an update.
I'm presenting today on behalf of the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities and its 13 members, which are the provincial and territorial organizations. It was established by legislation to serve in the public's interest by setting standards of practice and professional conduct and determining the qualifications to obtain and maintain a licence to practise medicine.
In December you received a copy of the latest draft agreement on national standards for medical registration in Canada. A few things have changed since then, but it's still a draft and we're aiming to do a bit of approval at our AGM in June.
We have defined the Canadian standard as the set of academic qualifications that automatically makes an applicant eligible for full licensure in any Canadian province or territory. To achieve the Canadian standard, the applicant must have four things. The applicant must have a medical degree from a recognized medical school; we rely on two lists of Canadian and international schools. The applicant must be a licentiate of the Medical Council of Canada. The applicant must have satisfactorily completed a discipline-appropriate post-graduate training program and ensuing evaluation by a recognized authority. We haven't quite defined “recognized” for that, but we're working on it. Finally, the applicant must be certified by either the College of Family Physicians of Canada or the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. That is the Canadian standard.
On the topic of international medical graduates, the recently signed agreement among the regulatory authorities covers not only the Canadian standard but additional standards for recognition of international medical graduates seeking licensure in Canada. Medical regulatory authorities agree that IMGs who do not meet the Canadian standard may initially be eligible for provisional licensure.
Our work to develop the national standards for provisional licensure includes four areas of work. One is the eligibility criteria, or what gets you into the system to begin with. Two is the pre-licensure assessment. If that goes well, there are supervision requirements for the applicant or the licensee for the duration of that provisional licence. And finally, there is a formative assessment that will take the applicant from a provisional licence to a full licence.
This work is pivotal to our goal of meeting the requirements under chapter 7, which is labour mobility in the agreement on internal trade. It is ahead of the expectations stated about the medical profession in the pan-Canadian framework for the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications.
We are working with the two national organizations that are responsible for the quality of family medicine and other specialist medical training in Canada. I mentioned them before. They are the College of Family Physicians of Canada and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. Both are doing what they can with their resources to determine the equivalency of medical training programs in other countries.
However, we know that we'll never have a complete picture of the equivalency, or even reasonable equivalency, of medical training around the world. Medical regulators in Canada will always have to rely on made-in-Canada assessments tailored to what is known about the quality of each international medical graduate. A tailored approach to assessments will be much more efficient than a one-size-fits-all approach, in our opinion. Although that might mean a faster track for graduates from some countries, we believe we can create a standardized approach that will be used across the country and that will be defensible both from the academic perspective and a human rights perspective.
The extensive experience and commitment of medical regulators in this country to foreign qualifications assessment and recognition is demonstrated by the licensing statistics in the table that was distributed today. We can get into this table later on, but you should have this before you--I translated it myself--and it will show you some numbers. We have asked our medical regulatory authorities to now start separating full and provisional licences for graduates of the Canadian system and international medical graduates.
You can do a bit of arithmetic and see that in some jurisdictions last year there were more international medical graduates who received new licences than graduates of the Canadian medical education system. We can talk about that a bit later.
This is a process in evolution, as we move to national standards. The way that people capture and upload the data to us will also be standardized.
Provincial and federal departments of labour and of health are very aware of the intensity with which medical regulatory authorities across Canada are developing a renewed national standard for physician registration, one that includes a common approach to the recognition and licensing of international medical graduates.
I can't repeat the next little bit enough: Medical regulatory authorities are tasked by governments in legislation to ensure physicians provide safe and effective care. They must walk a fine line between expectations for quality care and for access to any service at all in some parts of Canada.
Thank you for you attention. I will be pleased to answer questions in both official languages.