Thank you, Mr. Chair.
On behalf of Health Canada, I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to contribute to your study on foreign credential recognition. This morning I'd like to take a few minutes to provide you with a brief overview of investments that Health Canada has made to support improvements in credential recognition, specifically in the health professions.
To set the context for my remarks, I'd like to note that internationally educated health care professionals play an important role in the health workforce. To give you a few statistics from 2007, 22% of Canada's doctors, 15% of physiotherapists, and 8% of both occupational therapists and registered nurses were educated outside the country.
Despite their significant role, it is well documented that these professionals can face multiple challenges around integrating into the workforce. Barriers include: navigating the complex array of steps to licensure in their given profession, which may vary across the country's 13 provinces and territories; and, lack of familiarity with the Canadian health care system and its unique requirements for clinical practice in Canada.
In 2003, Canada's First Ministers made a commitment to work together to secure and maintain a stable and optimal health workforce in Canada. In 2004, first ministers agreed to a 10-year plan to strengthen health care, responding to concerns around timely access to quality care for all Canadians.
As part of the plan, federal, provincial and territorial leaders agreed to increase the supply of health professionals, in part, by accelerating and expanding the assessment and integration of internationally trained health care graduates.
In support of this 10-year plan, in the 2005 budget the Government of Canada committed $75 million over five years to the internationally educated health professionals initiative. The goal of this initiative, which is known by the acronym IEHPI, is to address barriers and advance progress in five areas related to the integration of internationally educated health professionals, including promoting preparedness of these professionals to self-assess; improving access to credential assessment and verification through increased access to information and path-finding; initiating faculty development programs to ensure that educators have the skills to teach internationally educated health professionals; supporting successful completion of licence or exams; and increasing the availability of training orientation and other supports to facilitate integration into the workforce.
To date, investments under the IEHPI have focused on seven priority occupations, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, medical laboratory technologists and medical radiation technologists. IEHPI is currently funded at $18 million per year. Approximately 90% of that program funding is directed to provincial and territorial governments through bilateral agreements with Health Canada.
This funding has increased the capacity of provincial and territorial governments to work with their regulators and professional associations to improve the integration process for internationally educated health professionals. Provinces and territories have developed innovative initiatives in the areas of credential assessment, bridge training, career counselling, information services, and orientation programs.
I'd like to give a few quick examples of some of the specific initiatives that provinces and territories have undertaken.
In December 2006, Ontario launched a "one-stop" information, counselling and path-finding service for internationally-educated health professionals wanting to apply for licensure to work in their field. By October 2008, the Centre had registered more than 5,200 clients. Among these clients are 92 internationally-educated doctors who were recently selected for residency positions in Ontario with the help of this service.
A competency assessment program for internationally-educated nurses was developed in Alberta and has been implemented in all the western provinces and Nova Scotia. The program assesses internationally-educated nurses' competencies and helps to prepare candidates for assessment and clinical practice in Canada.
In 2007 the assessment process was taken overseas to explore the feasibility of off-shore assessments to reduce the time required for the assessment and registration process. A total of 33 assessments were performed in four locations: England, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
In British Columbia, international medical graduates are receiving an orientation workshop that provides information on working in the medical field in Canada. Feedback from the first 65 medical graduates was positive, and plans are under way in that province to make the orientation session mandatory for all new international medical graduates.
As a final example, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan have partnered on strategies and tools for the assessment and verification of internationally educated occupational therapists' competencies to facilitate their practice in Canada.
Those were examples of provincial-territorial investments supported by Health Canada. The remaining 10% of IEHPI program funding supports pan-Canadian projects that are undertaken by national professional bodies, academic institutions, and health care organizations. Again, to give you a couple of examples,
the widely-subscribed “Orientation to the Canadian Health Care System, Culture and Context” workshop, developed by the University of Toronto, provides information on the Canadian health care system to internationally-educated professionals in six cities: Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon and Ottawa, and via an on-line program.