Healthcare professional shortages currently top the list when reading media reports on Canadian healthcare. But the best way to tackle the shortages, which impact every part of the country, is mired in a data and planning crisis.
Healthcare researchers have continuously sounded the alarm over Canada’s lack of health and human resources planning, and the lack of accessible, consistent national data to enable evidence-based decision-making. How can we solve the problem if we don’t have all the facts? Where should we spend our efforts and our dollars, if we don’t know where the logjams in the system are happening? How can we measure results if we don’t know the impact of our efforts?
It would be akin to operating on a patient in the dark.
It’s time the federal government brought robust leadership to health workforce data collection and planning.
Some of the challenge lies in overlapping or disparate jurisdictions — a perpetual Canadian problem.
Healthcare providers are licensed provincially, and provincial regulatory Colleges (where they have been established) are responsible for regulating health professions in each province and territory. But these regulators are not responsible for or engaged in health resource planning.
Provincial governments, who have a vested interest in health resource planning, have recently directed regulators to alter their processes to try to make more health practitioners available in the system, such as fast-tracking credentials for out-of-province health providers and finding new pathways to more quickly approve internationally trained providers to practice in Canada.
This is a good start, but it’s not really a plan so much a last-ditch response to an already blooming crisis. Such measures alone won’t solve the health care workforce shortage.
We need an integrated national plan based on robust data that includes regulators working alongside provincial governments.
Regulators are a rich — and the only — source of registry data for all licensed practitioners in a jurisdiction, regardless of how they bill or where they work. All other data repositories in the country depend on these data.
The good news is, by provincial legislative mandate, these data are complete, verified, and longitudinal, which means they are valuable. They are available in ‘real time’ without the time lags associated with many of the national-level data repositories, which often are not available, for a variety of very good reasons, until 18+ months after the fact. With the current rate of change in health workforce policy initiatives, that time lag results in evaluations often too late to determine if policies are effective.
We also need more and other kinds of data.
A significant challenge lies in the current fragmentation of data across jurisdictions. Regulators often collect similar data elements but with vastly different data structures or even interpretations. Standardization efforts are needed. There needs to be an effort to help data across jurisdictions ‘talk’ to one another — both within and across professions.
In partnership with the Canadian Institute for Health Information and other health workforce partners, the Canadian Health Workforce Network’s Enhanced Health Workforce Minimum Data Standard for Planning Project, a federal investment in health workforce data and planning, is working to allow us to ensure we are comparing apples to apples across jurisdictions.
The federal government has already taken some steps in the right direction.
Health Workforce Canada has undertaken a federal initiative to, among other things, unify workforce data systems and improve forecasting capabilities. Recent federal funding is also facilitating the operation and expansion of Canada’s national physician registry and the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada to optimize physician registration across the country in support of the previously mentioned provincially driven initiatives.
It is imperative that regulators play a key role, not just in medicine, but across health professions.
Regulatory bodies are uniquely positioned to provide critical, real-time workforce data, and with proper support, standardization, and capacity building, they can play a pivotal role in addressing Canada’s healthcare provider shortages while fulfilling their mandate of public protection.
But success to bring regulators into the national data and planning solution requires federal leadership. The federal government should convene regulators, fund both data development and ongoing operations, champion data standardization efforts, and foster cross-jurisdictional collaboration.
It’s time we created an integrated approach to health workforce planning and professional regulation that truly serves Canadians’ healthcare needs. Let’s get all hands at the table.
Photo courtesy of DepositPhotos
