Thank you.
Honourable members of the Standing Committee on Health, it's an absolute privilege to provide testimony today on behalf of the Pediatric Chairs of Canada, PCC.
As you've heard, I'm the pediatrician-in-chief and also the chair of pediatrics at the University of Toronto and The Hospital for Sick Children.
PCC is a national network of our academic child health leaders. We are dedicated to strengthening the future of pediatrics by working together to advance education, research and the excellent care of our children, youth and families. We also oversee the training of the next generation of specialized expert pediatric physicians across Canada.
PCC and Children's Healthcare Canada, our sister organization, have been advocating to put children back at the centre of policy-making. Investing in children's health yields measurable social and economic returns.
As you know, Canada's children have a right to health care. Right now, our collective ability to deliver this care in a timely way to children and youth increasingly depends on the strength of its highly specialized pediatric workforce. Today, that workforce is at risk.
Across the country, pediatricians and subspecialists, whose expertise is essential when children require preventative care, specialized treatments or coordinated diagnostics and management of complex conditions, are in very short supply. Importantly, pediatric subspecialists in areas such as cardiology, oncology and neurology are not interchangeable with those who care for adults and are significantly fewer in number.
There are more than eight million children currently living in Canada, and this number will increase by 24% over the next 50 years, yet across many jurisdictions, children now wait longer than adults for essential care, not because their needs are less urgent but because our workforce is too small, aging and increasingly stretched to meet the needs of an increasingly complex population of children.
To better understand the scope, PCC in 2024 conducted a national data collection focused on pediatric subspecialty physicians, the workforce and the trainees who are currently preparing to enter these fields. Our findings showed that shortages are causing delays in access to essential care, jeopardizing the short- and long-term outcomes of our children. Fewer trainees are choosing pediatrics, resulting in a shrinking workforce attempting to serve a growing, increasingly complex pediatric population.
As you've heard, there are insufficient provincial residency spots to train a sufficient number of Canadian pediatric subspecialists to meet the current demand. Finally, and importantly, there are delays in hiring internationally trained pediatric subspecialists, including Canadians trained abroad. This threatens service delivery, teaching and capacity building, as well as research and innovation.
Today, highly trained pediatric subspecialists, many urgently needed to maintain services, face unnecessary delays in immigration, protracted licensing timelines and systemic obstacles, preventing them from joining the workforce in a timely manner.
These barriers are not just administrative. They translate into longer work times, longer wait times for children, increased pressures on our hospitals, closure of programs and lost opportunities.
PCC would like to submit the following recommendations to the committee.
We suggest streamlining immigration processes, such as paperwork, authorizations for work permits and visas, creating faster, clearer pathways for permanent residency for pediatric specialists and other subspecialists.
We feel we need to prioritize pediatric subspecialists in existing immigration streams, such as express entry. We suggest harmonizing and coordinating licensure requirements across provinces and territories to reduce variability, as well as developing national standards for recognizing training from countries with similar standards and, finally, creating and expediting consistent—