Canada’s healthcare workforce is in dire need of an overhaul. Every day, “a family doctor tries to manage an overwhelming patient roster, a nurse covers another double shift, or a community clinic closes because it lacks health professionals,” Margot Burnell, MD, president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), wrote in a recent commentary. “The roots of this crisis are deep….However, there are solutions.” 

Those solutions are laid out in great detail in a series of documents recently published under the umbrella of CMA’s “roadmap for an integrated health workforce plan.” Four years in the making, the roadmap was developed in collaboration with healthcare leaders and professionals, researchers, policymakers, government representatives, and people with lived experience of the health system 

“I’m the eternal optimist,” Burnell told Medscape News Canada in an interview about the plan and where it’s heading. “Once you have a framework that you can put out to people and start building on it, then you will get the momentum to start working on it and moving it forward.”

No ‘Overnight’ Solutions

Canada is short by about 23,000 physicians and 14,000 licensed practical nurses, according to the latest data. “Although there are multiple strategies now in place to try to increase those numbers, that's not going to happen overnight,” Burnell said.

Strategies underway and outlined in the workforce plan include increasing the number of seats at medical schools and residency positions, as well as “incorporating internationally trained physicians who are within our country to be assessed, and when they’re deemed safe and competent, to be integrated into the workforce,” she said. “We’re also looking at bringing internationally trained graduates to Canada if they are interested in practicing here.” 

Canada’s Indigenous health workforce also needs to be strengthened, according to the plan. Efforts to expand the Indigenous health workforce must be led by First Nations,

Inuit, and Métis individuals and organizations, with support from healthcare allies, as well as the Indigenous health team at CMA, she said.

In the short term, there needs to be a “significant expansion of team-based care,” Burnell emphasized. This means “having a group of individuals located in a given area, much as a school set up for people living in a school district, where there are physicians, nurse practitioners, allied health social workers, pharmacists, and dietitians, as determined by the needs of the community. When a patient comes with a concern, if they’ve had a major life event like a heart attack or a cancer diagnosis, then they see the physician. If it’s someone who has a new medication and wants to know if they take it on a full or empty stomach, they see the pharmacist. If they need drug coverage, they see the social worker, and so forth.”

In her commentary, Burnell noted that successful models of team-based approaches are in place across Canada, and CMA and its partners need to collaborate with the nonprofit Healthcare Excellence Canada, other professional associations, health institutions, and human resource planners to expand them.

Furthermore, in response to the excessive workloads, exhaustion, and burnout documented in CMA’s 2025 National Physician Health Survey, the new roadmap includes a mental health and wellness strategy.

‘Clean Up the Data’

A crucial need for the long term is workforce data, Burnell said. “We need the government to encourage organizations that have data that are siloed to be transparent and share the data among health systems.”

For example, no one knows how many full-time nurses are in a given province because the nurses may be working in various part-time positions. Similarly for physicians, “How many have a full-time practice? And maybe also are doing hospitalist work? Emergency department shifts? Or operating room assistant work?” Burnell asked.

“We need to have those data, and we need them cleaned up with standard definitions so we can know how many folks we have in the system and what they’re doing. And we need the oversight body that can request some of these agencies to provide the numbers.” 

‘Political Will’ Needed

CMA has had discussions with Health Canada and many of the other stakeholders, most of whom agree that the data and other aspects of the roadmap are needed, Burnell affirmed. For the integrated workface plan to move forward, Health Canada would need to fund it and bring the people and organizations together.

“CMA would be one of the stakeholders at the table representing physicians,” Burnell explained. “But we need all the stakeholders at the table to make these important decisions and move forward. We need the political will of these organizations to say this is important and we need some dollars to fund it. Our comprehensive stepwise plan lays the groundwork for all the other organizations to build on.”

Marilynn Larkin, MA, is an award-winning medical writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Medscape Medical News and its sister publication MDEdge, The Lancet (where she was a contributing editor), and Reuters Health.