I think one of our biggest challenges is that without a human health resource plan, we've never defined clearly how many positions are needed to serve Canadians on different levels of medicine. For example, we know that we need people in primary care. Well, what's that exact number? We know we need specialist care. What's that exact number? Where should the physicians be located?
Without that pan-Canadian human health resource plan, it's then challenging to start back at the beginning. At the medical school level, how many people should we be training? How many should there be at the postgraduate level? How many people should we then be training in these different specialties of medicine, which types and where? Right now I think the issue is that none of this is integrated. That's very challenging, and it means we have these shortages.
The other piece is that we do have internationally trained medical graduates in Canada who have been unable to access the system. They remain uncredentialed and unlicensed, and they haven't been able to participate in the systems that exist to get into actual practice and caring for Canadians. There's also work that could be done there to bring more of those folks on board and into our system.