Health committee  I can take a stab at this. I think what we have suggested is an option for the federal government to provide resources to the provinces and territories to be able to add additional capacity into the system so that they have individuals who can do some of those tasks to free up ph

Health committee  I'd be happy to. I would also like to add to what Dr. Bouchard talked about. There is an ability to do more integration of the electronic health records that we have. We have spent millions and millions of dollars across the country implementing systems that were not built wit

Health committee  Ontario is more recent. I'll give you an example. They put resources in place very quickly during the pandemic to work with the regulator to expedite getting those individuals through the process. The primary issue we hear with internationally educated nurses is that there are th

Health committee  I can't give you the number off the top of my head, but I can certainly try to get you a clearer number.

Health committee  Yes, we have. I would say that the medical profession is further ahead on this matter than nurses are. We're advocating for a national nursing identifier, where a nurse would have an identification number that would follow them through their whole career across the country. That

Health committee  To our knowledge, no. We certainly have seen, across the globe, some countries doing a fairly good job at this. I think there are some examples we can learn from. The United States has a program for doing this. I don't think we have to start from scratch and recreate the wheel.

Health committee  I don't mind starting. The simple answer is not one of them that will be the single solution that's going to be the biggest one getting us out of this situation. It's multi-faceted. It's going to need a multi-faceted approach. From a nursing perspective, we do know there are a

Health committee  I haven't directly had the opportunity to observe how each province and territory is actually collecting data. I can tell you, based on my personal experience, that Nova Scotia has done some really good work in this area, particularly on the non-physician side of the health workf

Health committee  I think it's all of that. To add some context, we've added a number of things to nurses' work environment, some of which are related to their doing non-nursing-related tasks. We've seen examples of that. As some organizations have implemented new electronic health records that ar

Health committee  If that question was directed to me, I actually think Dr. Smart would be a better person to answer it, because it's very much focused on primary care. I would defer that to her.

Health committee  As my colleagues did, I would say it's vitally important. I think the one thing I have to add, though, is that the additional money is not going to be the only solution when we are looking at a mental health system that also has vacancies. Over the last two years with registered

Health committee  No, there isn't. Each province and territory is collecting information separately, and we find that we have to sometimes go facility by facility. For individual provinces, some of them don't even know what their workforce data needs are. I think this is more difficult than just a

Health committee  We have had communication with all of the provincial and territorial departments of health. We've included the communication that we've sent to the federal government to all 13 provinces and territories, recommending the same approaches to them all. I would say that when there's

Health committee  Thank you for the additional question. We are not as specific in recommending the final outcome of how the data collection occurs. What's more important is that it be expeditious and there be national standards in the data that's collected, so that we have information that tell

Health committee  I think it's multi-faceted. We hear from nurses that one of the reasons they're choosing to consider leaving the profession is their workplace environments. They're talking about having to work short of people, having excessive workloads where they're looking after twice as many