Good afternoon. Thank you for having us. I am Noura Hassan. I am president of the Canadian Federation of Medical Students. I am here with Chloé Ward, who is our vice-president of advocacy.
I would be happy to answer your questions in English or in French.
The Canadian Federation of Medical Students represents over 7,800 medical students attending 14 medical schools in Canada. Thank you for having us to discuss the issue of labour shortages in Canada.
Today we wanted to address three key issues in health human resources from our perspective. First, we wanted to bring to your attention a pending oversupply of physicians. We had a presentation from the Royal College earlier, so we're going to build on that, providing a little more of the student perspective.
Second, we'd like to address some labour shortages in key medical specialties. Last, we're going to discuss the geographic maldistribution of health human resources in Canada.
As you all know, more than 20 years ago, in 1990, Canada was faced with a significant physician undersupply. This issue was addressed by a number of medical stakeholders, including the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Forum, and that led to an increase in admissions at medical schools across the country. At this point, we are training more physicians than ever in Canada. Essentially this is good news because it limits the likelihood of physician undersupply as it stands right now. However, as you also know, it takes from six to eleven years to train a physician who is ready to practise in Canada. For that reason, it's clear that we only see the impact of any changes in policy with respect to medical school admissions five or ten years down the road. It's not an immediate result.
At this point we're starting to see a change in paradigm. In the not-too-distant future, some graduating medical students will not be finding jobs upon completion of their specialty training. When I say “specialty training”, I'm not only speaking about Royal College specialties, I'm also talking about family medicine. We have information from CIHI suggesting a net influx of 1,600 physicians in 2010. This is important to note because this does not reflect the biggest medical classes that have graduated. Bigger cohorts have yet to pass through the system. So we're going to keep seeing a more important net influx of physicians as the years go on.
As it stands right now, we need a mechanism that will help us match the residency training positions to Canadian health care needs from one end of Canada to the other. So essentially what we need is a joint mechanism. Ideally, it would be a federal-provincial effort that will help us ensure that we're not training too many physicians in Canada.
We have to stop this reactive yo-yo trend that we've been experiencing in Canada with respect to human health resource training. We have to be proactive to make sure we're serving the interests of students, medical schools, and our taxpayers.