Margaret Walton-Roberts
Associate professor, geography
Margaret Walton Roberts: Canada faces a potential shortage of 60,000 nurses by the year 2022, and our study was looking at the incorporation of internationally-educated nurses into the Canadian health care system. This is one solution to these kinds of shortages, but the integration of those nurses depends upon policies incorporating between federal government makers—decision-makers and professional regulators.
We’re hopeful that our Knowledge Synthesis project, which looked at the inclusion of internationally-educated nurses into the Canadian nursing professions will have some kind of impact in terms of policy decisions that are made about immigration policy reform and how those policies can intersect with the professional regulators, and in this case the—those are the various Canadian regulators across Canada who are engaged in monitoring nursing.
Health human resource planning must incorporate both the federal government immigration policy-makers as well as the professional regulators in the nursing professions.