Retaining Canada’s Healthcare Workforce
Keeping Talented Workers in Our Health Systems
Français • August 6, 2025
A system under strain
Canada’s healthcare system is facing a human resource crisis. Despite investments in recruitment and training, provincial and territorial health systems are struggling to retain healthcare professionals as workers move to other provinces or leave Canada altogether.
While some degree of worker mobility has its benefits, high turnover imposes financial costs on the health system. It also hurts staff morale, reduces productivity, and, most importantly, compromises patient care.
Understanding and addressing turnover is essential to stabilizing and strengthening Canada’s healthcare workforce.
In this project, we will:
- Track movement of healthcare workers within and outside of Canada across seven key roles: physicians, nurses, pharmacists, medical radiation and imaging technologists, dentists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists.
- Quantify the cost to the health system of healthcare worker migration.
- Make evidence-based recommendations to help healthcare educators, regulatory bodies, and policy-makers retain the workforce and distinguish between strategies for domestically or internationally trained professionals.
Investing in healthcare talent
Provincial and federal governments have made substantial investments in attracting and integrating healthcare workers, particularly those who are internationally trained. These investments include funding for foreign recruitment programs, subsidizing credential recognition services, providing access to free language training services, and other settlement support services.
Some provinces such as Newfoundland and Labrador also provide financial incentives for those who commit to a return-of-service program in a rural or remote community.
In Budget 2024, the Government of Canada committed $77.1 million over four years to improve how internationally educated health care professionals are integrated into Canada’s health workforce. The plan creates 120 specific training positions, increases assessment capacity, and provides support to navigate credential recognition systems.
In addition, the federal government is investing $25 billion to help the provinces better recognize foreign credentials for internationally educated health professionals as part of the Working Together to Improve Health Care for Canadians Plan.
These investments are intended to help Canada’s health system better coordinate human resources across its many jurisdictions. Competing for healthcare professionals from other regions undermines efforts to address workforce shortages and increases turnover costs in provinces’ limited operating budgets.
Retaining our healthcare workforce saves turnover costs
Retaining healthcare workers is vital to ensuring care across Canada is sustainable and high quality. High turnover rates mean that healthcare settings need to spend a larger share of their limited resources on training and recruitment costs, while also straining remaining staff and reducing the quality of service that patients receive.
Increasing retention will minimize turnover costs, protect investments in training, and better ensure that healthcare systems are meeting growing demands.
Stabilizing the healthcare workforce
Using the latest available data collected directly from the Canadian Institute for Health Information and provincial regulatory bodies, we will produce a dynamic heatmap to visualize workforce flows within, and out of, Canada.
We will speak with 21 representatives from regulatory bodies and 35 healthcare educators in seven focus groups to gather insights on the following questions:
- How do regulatory bodies monitor the retention of healthcare workers?
- What influences whether healthcare workers stay or leave, including systemic, professional, and personal factors?
- What strategies and programs are currently being implemented to address retention and outmigration?
- How do retention challenges and strategies differ between domestically and internationally trained workers?
- What are examples of promising practices to better retain healthcare workers in Canada?
Insights from this research will help Canadian health systems use the best available evidence on workforce retention to enhance patients’ and providers’ experiences, improve patients’ health outcomes, expand overall health equity, and lower costs.
Get involved
If you’d like to learn more about this project, please contact Eddy Nason, Director, Health
FSC partners
The responsibility for the findings and conclusions of this research rests entirely with The Conference Board of Canada.