OTTAWA, Ont, Canada - About four million Canadians, or about 12 per cent of the population, don't have a family doctor, a 2009 poll conducted for the College of Family Physicians of Canada suggested.Health-care professionals are still having difficulty moving across borders within Canada despite provincial governments' efforts to reduce barriers to labour mobility.
Provincial governments agreed in December 2008 to a deal that was supposed to make it easier for professionals to transfer their licences between provinces.
Provincial governments were hoping the changes would help fill in holes in the skilled workforce. Many provinces including Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are currently facing a shortage of doctors as many residents are unable to find a family physician.
But some doctors say the colleges who are responsible for approving licences aren't respecting the provincial agreement. "This is something that was agreed amongst the politicians but it was not agreed amongst the physicians," said Dr. Rubens Barbosa, a Brazilian-trained anaesthesiologist working in Edmundston, N.B., who recently had an application to transfer his licence to Ontario rejected.- The responsibility for who does and doesn't become licensed is left up to bodies that are run by physicians in each province.
Numbers maintained by the colleges suggest the changes to the Agreement on Internal Trade, which was updated in April 2009 with the new labour mobility provisions, have done little to change the number of physicians moving from one province to another.The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Nova Scotia has granted licences to about 250 applicants since April 2009, six of those under the labour mobility provisions.
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