I think in the past there have been some limitations at the government level in restricting billing numbers for physicians in order to try to direct the health workforce into certain locations. To my knowledge, I don't believe that we see the provincial and territorial medical associations at all limiting numbers of training spots, either at medical school or at the post-graduate level.
What we do have is a lack of coordination between the outputs that we're trying to achieve in terms of practising physicians, in primary care specialities as well as other specialty areas, and post-graduate training opportunities. Again, this also speaks to the issue also with credentialing and licensing. This is another reason that we feel there is a strong opportunity for a pan-Canadian licence.
When you look at IMGs and their ability to be credentialed and then brought into the Canadian system, you see that it looks different in every province and territory, and the cost associated with that is significant. It is a definite barrier to our being able to mobilize those physicians into our workforce.
We believe that when we start talking about things like decreasing those regulatory barriers and looking at things like a national licence, it would allow us to remove some of that administrative burden. It would also give the federal government an opportunity to fund and support those physicians to be credentialed, trained and brought into our system. Those are examples of solutions, I think, where the federal government definitely has levers it could pull that would have a strong outcome.
We also believe that by creating a pan-Canadian human health resource strategy, we're then able to go to the medical school and post-graduate training level and make sure that those things are aligning to create the outputs of both numbers and types of physicians needed in the system.