Thank you for that question and for quoting from the article.
I think moving towards pan-Canadian coordination of the collection of data would allow us to plan across different sectors. We're having a conversation about professions, but professions work in sectors. Physicians work in palliative care, as my colleagues have noted here. Folks work in long-term care and mental health care. The types of dashboards they're creating in other OECD countries are looking at this with an interprofessional and sector focus.
Those types of data enhancements would really help local decision-makers in a variety of different organizations. It's not just the provinces, territories, regions and hospitals, and so on. They would want to have access, to say, “Do we have enough?” and “How should we go about planning different models of care?”
We have no idea. I cannot tell you how many personal support workers there are in Canada. I can't tell you how many addictions counsellors there are in Canada. We absolutely need to have that information.
Here's the data story. The Canadian Institute of Health Information gets data on physicians from a for-profit company. They don't get it from the medical regulatory authorities. For all of the other professions, they get it from medical regulatory authorities for a select number. The Canadian Institute of Health Information has to negotiate data-sharing agreements with dozens of regulatory authorities for the different professions that are regulated. Then they have to collect all of that data, none of which aligns. They have to match that all up, so they spend all of their time negotiating data-sharing agreements and then all of their time trying to make a mountain out of the mess that there is.
The data we have is on gender as binary—male or female—as well as age and province. You cannot do any health workforce planning with that type of data. We can do better than this. We have the amazing Statistics Canada, an agency that collects things nationally, on a pan-Canadian basis. What's very interesting about the data from StatsCan is that it's based on the national occupational codes, and none of that aligns with regulatory authority data.
I'll give you just one example. I know the Canadian occupational projection system—COPS—has been noted in this committee. COPS suggests that there are 75,000 family physicians in Canada. We know there are about 45,000 physicians in Canada, so an error of 30,000 is pretty remarkable. Federal funds go into the COPS system. Federal funds go into a national occupational code that doesn't work at all for health workers. I'm not a decision-maker, but I can't imagine what it must be like making decisions when you have absolutely no tools.
Given the questions the committee has asked our colleagues here, that should be readily accessible. We should have early warning systems for unmatched medical graduates and for shortages of personal support workers.