Province Looking to International Scene for Health Professionals
By 250 News
The Province is going to expand its Skills Connect for Immigrants Program to the health sector.
Services for the health sector will focus on clients in the 12 health occupations experiencing skill shortages, including registered and licensed practical nurses, laboratory technologists, pharmacists, occupational therapists, physicians, physiotherapists. The target is to help 200 clients through the program by March 31, 2008, and 400 in
fiscal year 2008/09.
"Internationally educated health professionals have much to offer British Columbia," said Health Minister George Abbott. "Making it easier and faster for qualified immigrants to work in British Columbia will make the province a destination of choice and bolster our workforce."
Skills Connect services program helps immigrants navigate an unfamiliar labour market, overcome language barriers, gain experience in the Canadian workplace
and upgrade their skills, if necessary.
The Ministry of Health, with funding from Health Canada's Internationally Educated Health Professions Initiative, will contribute $1.0 million in 07/08 towards the cost to expand Skills Connect to the health sector.
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Posted by: Chester on October 6 2007 3:53 PM
I originally came to Canada in 1967 (to Winnipeg) under such a program from the Manitoba and Federal governments for exactly the same reason that is now given, shortages of properly trained personnel. Since then I have seen repeated bouts of the same thing, including trips to the UK by the Director of Nursing at PGRH in the past.
Obviously I have benefited personally by getting easy access as an immigrant, but I have always wondered why Canada doesn't train enough people of its own. Why is it not concerned with providing opportunity for its own students?
I know for a fact that it is not due to a lack of interest by Canadian, BC or PG young people. In my time at PGRH I oversaw the Medical Laboratory training program and helped select the students to be trained, and we were swamped with applications for the few places we had available. There certainly is a lot of interest in becoming health care workers of all kinds.
What appears to be missing, now and from successive governments of all types in the past, is a commitment to put enough money into advanced education and training of health care workers so that Canadians can fill the needed positions throughout the country and, more pointedly, in BC.
Instead, the province prefers to poach workers from other countries, often less wealthy ones where health care workers may already be in shorter supply than in Canada, thus forcing those countries to both subsidise our educational and health care systems and cause those countries to deal with even greater shortages than they would otherwise have.
Why is it that our own citizens cannot be trained? There is more than enough interest by students leaving colleges and universities. Surely forty years is long enough to have solved this problem!