A program announced this year may help foreign-trained nurses get accredited in Canada just in time, as data suggests a nursing shortage is set to worsen.
A recent report by Statistics Canada highlights the challenge: While there are more than half a million people in Canada with foreign training in nursing, “large percentages of immigrant women with a nursing education from a foreign school did not have a health occupation.”
Meanwhile, the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions (CFNU) has declared a national staffing crisis. The CFNU says Canada could be short more than 117,000 nurses by 2030.
Earlier this year, the federal government announced the PASS program, which provides funding and support to help foreign-trained nurses cover the cost of credential recognition, exams and training.
With a growing attrition rate among nurses, the country is struggling to replace nurses fast enough to stall and eventually reverse the industry’s chronically declining numbers. A report published by the CFNU says one in four practicing Canadian nurses intend to leave their current job in the next four years. The situation was exacerbated during the 2020 pandemic, with many citing burnout among the reasons for leaving the profession.
“The expectations put on nurses were exhausting,” said Kim McMillan, associate professor of nursing at the University of Ottawa. “[It was not] sustainable to hold up a system that was already broken.”
In an attempt to ease the workload facing Canadian nurses, researchers are highlighting the untapped potential of IENs living in Canada, many working in occupations that underuse their skills. Eager to join the workforce, many internationally trained nurses face additional hurdles when registering their nursing education in Canada.
In 2024, there were only 48,090 working registered nurses with an international education compared to 285,915 with a Canadian education, data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows.
When IENs are able to enter the workplace, they have much higher rates of mental health issues and tend to experience racism in the workplace, said McMillan.
There are hurdles at every step from the migration process to language requirements and navigating the necessary steps for licensure. The process to obtain education equivalency is lengthy, with some applicants waiting years for a response. Competing against domestic nurses and international recruits for hiring, many IENs are turning to working in other health-related occupations despite being overqualified.
The barriers to registration render many internationally educated nurses, who are eager to join the workforce, unable to. This is something the PASS program is intended to address.
Immigrant women in Canada holding a foreign education in nursing have been identified as an underused worker when they were employed in non-health occupations or in health occupations requiring less education than they had completed. According to Statistics Canada, immigrant women accounted for one-quarter or 27 per cent of working-age Canadians with a nursing education.
Despite this representation, for example, only one-half of Chinese (53 per cent), Korean or Japanese (50 per cent) women with nursing education were employed in health occupations, StatCan found, leaving a large percentage of female IENs in jobs that made no use of their education.
Other population groups fared better, but it was found that IENs within those groups were still working in positions that did not match their level of educational attainment. While over 70 per cent of Filipino IENs were employed in health-related jobs, only 38 per cent had a job that matched their level of education.
“Internally educated nurses are a key component of our governments’ plans to address the nursing crisis in Canada,” said Linda Silas, president of the CFNU in a press release earlier this year. The issue lies in the need to streamline the process of integrating IENs into the workforce to more effectively impact the national shortage crisis.
If the shortage continues to go unaddressed, the entire health care system will feel it and patients will see emergency room wait times continuously rising, explained McMillan.
