This is another issue. And thank you for opening that one up, because I think one of the major problems we have not discussed in this country is the fact that it may not be the numbers of doctors that is essential, but how the system works, and we're not talking about other health professionals and their roles in the health care of populations.
Work has been done on the fact that, for example, Germany has poorer health outcomes than we do, but they have twice as many doctors per population as we do. Not enough emphasis has been put on re-engineering the system. Canadian medical schools are moving to interprofessional educational models, and we are trying to do some assessment on this.
I think we have to be really careful about the numbers. Dr. Varastehpour pointed out that we have 250,000-plus immigrants a year. At least 500 to 750 of those should be and would be physicians. There should be a commitment, I think, to integrating those physicians into the country. But the fact that the percentage has dropped, one could argue we're moving to sustainability on those percentages as well, and that was another aspect of ethical recruiting of international medical graduates. My own feeling on ethical recruiting is if individuals are recruited, we have an obligation to integrate them into the country's practice.
Madam Chair, a pan-Canadian HHR framework was negotiated a number of years ago, and I was involved in some of the data that went into that, but I haven't heard anyone talk about that.