According to a first-of-its-kind study by Health Canada, our nation is facing a significant challenge in addressing labour market imbalances in the health-care sector.  

This pan-Canadian study focused on five primary care health-care professions, including nursing (which covers licensed practical nurses, registered psychiatric nurses, registered nurses, and nurse practitioners), occupational therapy, physiotherapy, pharmacy, and medicine (with a specific focus on family medicine). 

The findings highlight a significant gap between the supply and the demand for health-care workers in Canada, which is expected to significantly worsen without proper intervention. Current challenges include exacerbated gaps in rural and remote regions, restricted training capacity in northern regions, and barriers faced by Indigenous people who work or want to work in Canada’s health-care workforce. For improvement, strengthening data systems for better workforce planning will be a critical action.  

However, severe challenges with data collection are complicating efforts to understand the rate at which new professionals are being trained. In turn, strategic workforce planning is difficult. For example, the authors note that obtaining education and training data from most sources was difficult and that the data they collected from those sources differed significantly. Further, data about a given profession varied, even when looking at the same jurisdiction. Remarkably, the authors noted that it is not possible to follow a health-care professional from training through practice and retirement (except for physicians). 

The authors call for more work in improving data quality, integrity, comprehensiveness and timeliness, as well as continued efforts to improve modelling.  

They also call for more analyses to better understand some of the potential challenges and opportunities in connecting education and training capacity with workforce supply and demand.