Foreign-trained professionals are here and ready
As Canada’s health-care capacity reels under the ravages of COVID-19, which is now felling front-line workers, what if the country were gifted with thousands upon thousands of trained medical experts, without lifting travel restrictions or expediting visas?
If such a gift sounds too good to be true, it is not.
Around the country, foreign-trained doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals, many with expertise in epidemiology, practise in resourcescare situations and experience in the Canadian health-care system, are petitioning provincial governments, offering their services and waiting to be able to contribute in the nation’s hour of need.
“We are coming forward to willingly volunteer, hands-on, without expecting to be paid, so we can alleviate front-line workers during this time of crisis,” reads a petition by Ali Mahdi to federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu, titled the International Medical Graduates (IMGs) in Canada Responding against COVID-19. It gathered 15,000 signatures in two weeks.
“When we started this conversation a week ago, I heard from at least five organizations with lists of people gearing up to go. People are itching to practise their skills,” said Debbie Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. “We’re also hearing from politicians who are hearing from internationally trained health-care professionals in their ridings who are saying ‘Do something, we’re here, we’re ready.’ ”
Just last week, a Brampton councillor asked the province to help more foreign-trained doctors assist with the COVID-19 crisis.
In Ontario, there is demand, there is supply, there is even agreement; the Ontario Medical Association told the Star it is “supportive of measures” to address the shortage of doctors.
All that is required is a nod from the Ministry of Health.
It’s frustrating for the doctors in question to be on the sidelines at a time like this.
“It’s like you are a trained soccer player and you cannot participate. You can only watch the game from home,” said Mahmoud Abdelmotalib, 31, who graduated from Cairo University in Egypt and worked as a physician for five years for its Ministry of Health. “I have clinical experience. I finished the medical school. I passed the licence exams (in Canada). And I cannot contribute during a pandemic.”
Ayesha Badiuzzaman, 32, arrived in Canada six months ago. She graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland — Medical University of Bahrain and worked as a doctor in Qatar for two-and-a-half years.
“Canada is our country now. What can we do to help Canada? We are a resource. How do we be the most useful version of ourselves? We don’t want to just sit here and watch our colleagues battle it out on the front lines,” she said.
Badiuzzaman co-founded a Facebook group on March 22 with Mahdi called IMGs in Canada Responding Against COVID-19. It already has 600 members and the founders are getting new member requests every day, she said.
The barriers for foreign-trained doctors to practise in Canada are well documented. Many pass their licensing exams but can’t land a residency position that is required to get a licence to practise in Ontario.
However, as Douglas says, “We’re not trying to use this crisis to say ‘Let’s get people licensed.’ There is a need in our health institutions and we have the skills and knowledge within our community. Let’s give people the opportunity to contribute because that’s what they’re asking to do.”
Meanwhile, demand rises. Retired doctors are coming back to work.
On Tuesday, the Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket put out a call for volunteer doctors for its critical care unit. “No advance training is required,” the email from the medical staff association president and chief of staff said. Volunteers would be under supervision of a critical care specialist.
In a new report from the University of
Calgary’s school of public policy, research associate Robert Falconer calls this inability to match the demand for health care with the supply of immigrant doctors a medical “brain waste.”
Three agencies including OCASI, the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) and World Education Services (WES) proposed an idea to Ontario that called for “an implementation plan to recruit, train, and deploy” foreign-trained doctors and nurses “to support Ontario’s healthcare system in this state of emergency.”
“It’s important to state explicitly that this is not about replacing union workers. We want unions to be onside. This is about having all hands on deck,” Douglas said. “This is an opportunity to use the resources that exist in our community.”
The agencies’ pitch said Ontario alone has more than 13,000 internationally trained physicians, 6,000 internationally trained nurses, medical lab technicians, respiratory therapists, and other health professionals, citing the database for Healthforce Ontario’s Access Centre for Internationally Educated Health Professionals (IEHPs).
These are primarily professionals who are “unlicensed in Ontario and are working towards becoming licensed and integrating into the Ontario healthcare system either in their profession or an alternative career,” said Debroy Chan, interim executive director at TRIEC.
“It is difficult at this stage to put a number on the potential workforce they represent since we don’t know how many are available and how many are not. But he said it was clear “there are large numbers” who are keen to pitch in, in any way appropriate.
According to the Ontario Medical Association (OMA), there are 31,500 physicians practising in the province.
In a statement, OMA president Sohail Gandhi said: “The OMA has long been advocating for additional numbers of physicians in Ontario and would be supportive of measures to address this issue.” More doctors “will almost certainly be needed in Ontario,” he said.
The OMA said it supports the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s recent measures to allow physicians who haven’t trained in Ontario to apply for an “expedited short-term supervised licence to practise medicine” in the province. It’s not clear if these measures apply to foreign-trained doctors.
British Columbia went a step further Wednesday when its College of Physicians and Surgeons proposed a bylaw change to allow international medical graduates to apply for a restricted licence “as associate physicians under the direction and supervision of attending physicians in acute care settings.”
These doctors and other health workers — a group that includes Canadians who studied abroad as well as immigrants — who want to help are immersed in the Canadian health system.
Abdelmotalib has been temporarily laid off from his job as a physician assistant in Ottawa. He also has a casual job at the University of Ottawa tutoring nursing and health sciences students.
Badiuzzaman is a clinical research assistant in Hamilton and freelances as a medical writer.
While Abdelmotalib worked for the ministry of health in Egypt, he was also director of a health-care facility in the village of Sirsina, population 300,000. There, he was responsible for preventive measures like screening and managing endemic and epidemic outbreaks, providing vaccination to children, pregnant women and the elderly.
“We’re familiar with wartime pressure, and with shortage of resources,” Abdelmotalib said of foreign-trained doctors. “We can be part of the screening and testing process. We can provide counselling services to people in quarantine. We can listen to them and see the situation; is it emergent? Does it require them to go to the hospital? Our main role would be to relieve the capacity of the hospital.”
Badiuzzaman gives an example of her sister-in-law, also a foreign-trained doctor in Canada, who used to volunteer at a Rohingya refugee camp during that crisis in Bangladesh. “A lot of us have experience doing clinical experience in crisis times.
“We have the skills, we want to help. Please let us.”