Toward a pan-Canadian planning framework for health human resources : Pour un cadre pancanadien de planification des ressources humaines du secteur de la santé

Introduction While the Canadian Constitution assigns the responsibility for the delivery of health care to the provinces/territories, since its introduction in the 1960s, Medicare has sought to provide universal access to Canadians to hospital and medical services on uniform terms and conditions as set out in the Canada Health Act. [...] Recent federal and provincial reports have highlighted the need to address the underutilization of professional skills and knowledge and to move toward optimizing the utilization of all members of the multidisciplinary team. [...] B. PAN-CANADIAN PLANNING Undoubtedly the biggest challenge to adopting a pan-Canadian approach to health human resource planning is the fact that the provinces and territories have primary responsibility for education and delivery of health services (with the exception of Aboriginal health services provided by the federal government). [...] In the case of medicine the national character of the education/training system may be seen in the following table which looks at the location of undergraduate medical education and postgraduate training compared to location of practice for Canadian medical graduates exiting post-MD training in 2003. [...] One experiment that should be assessed is the 2003 MOU between the Government of South Africa and the Government of the U. K. that focuses on the reciprocal educational exchange of personnel.26.