Deb Gordon, Interim CEO  

Happy New Year!    

As I reflect on 2024, I think about the challenges confronting our health care system, the opportunities that lie ahead, and our role in finding meaningful solutions. A significant number of people without access to primary care in their communities, lengthy wait times for services, competing financial pressures, and some emergency room closures are just some of the most pressing challenges. At the same time, our country is grappling with a growing and aging population that will increase the demand for health services.   

The backbone of our health care system is the caring and skilled health workforce. I understand the pressures those on the frontlines face, both as a nurse and a former health system leader. This past year, I have had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with so many individuals and organizations that are doing incredible work to respond and address the challenges facing the health workforce.  It is reassuring to see the positive impact of their hard work and dedication.    

Before my mother passed recently, she was hospitalized for almost two weeks and then received help and support from a community-based palliative team. I witnessed such extraordinary staff, who worked tirelessly around the clock, to give my mom the best possible care. Too often, our health workers are working almost every shift 30 to 40% short staffed or being asked to do more with less. Still, they give their very best every shift.   

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many health workers being fatigued and stressed with some leaving their chosen profession. Across the country, we are short health workers in the community, in hospitals, in assisted living and long-term care homes, in clinics, and other settings. According to CIHI, there were 120,000 job vacancies in 2022/23 across the country. By addressing health workforce shortages, we can make a big difference to everyone in Canada. This includes people waiting for urgent care, those struggling to access primary care, individuals needing home care and continuing care, mental health services, and many others.    

I want to wish all health workers and health system leaders a very Happy New Year. Thank you for all the wonderful care and support you provide to the people of Canada.  

As we enter into our second year, Health Workforce Canada is maturing and growing as an organization. We take our mandate seriously to connect health workforce data across the country to support better planning. And ultimately, to help ensure health workers are there to meet the health care needs of people, when and where care is needed.  

We know that you need access to relevant information to make the best decisions, and our success will lie in our collaborations – by working across professions, institutions, provinces and territories – to share information and solutions with the goal of alleviating the stress on our valued health workers so they can give the best possible care.   

While bringing more health workers into the system is part of the solution, it will not be possible to recruit our way out of this situation. We need to focus on innovative models of care, putting emphasis on retention, healthy workplace environments and cultures so that the health workforce can thrive.  

I’m proud of the work we have done in our first year with our small and mighty team. We launched our data dashboards that bring information about Canada’s health workforce into one place to increase understanding of the workforce and how to meet future workforce needs. The dashboards offer an interactive, consolidated view of some of the pan-Canadian health workforce data available today.   

This year, we’re working on providing insights and context about the data in the dashboards to further support health workforce planning. We’re also collaborating with others on health workforce modelling and forecasting so we can meet the future needs of the population across Canada, from urban to rural to remote and from coast to coast to coast.  A big part of this work will be in bringing the modelling community together to co-develop common solutions to forecasting challenges and creating open-source spaces for sharing data, methodologies, definitions and common solutions.  

By building connections through our first symposium in the fall and the work that we are doing throughout the year, we are building relationships and the ability to share data and learnings more easily. We are taking early steps in building relationships with First Nations, Inuit and Métis health organizations to support their health workforce data capabilities and planning needs.  

Improved planning and forecasting create efficiencies in our health care system – because having the right supply of health providers when and where we need them – will keep us healthier and make us less reliant on hospital and emergency care.   

I’m looking forward to this year as we work hard to make the data about Canada’s health workforce more complete, more timely and more connected so we can ensure a strong and resilient health workforce for the future.