In January, 2005, the Health Council of Canada released its first report to Canadians, entitled Health Care Renewal in Canada: Accelerating Change.

In that report, the Council identified an urgent issue facing the future of our health care system: the need to ensure that the health care workforce will be strong enough in the years to come to care for our aging, changing population.

At the time of that first report, we urged health care stakeholders to "hurry up" and get on with addressing these health human resources challenges, because if we don't, all our other efforts at renewing health care are in jeopardy.

For our part, the Health Council promised to convene a summit on the issue, bringing together front-line workers, representatives of professional associations, academics and policy makers from the worlds of health care and education.

The June 2005 summit gave us some important insights about the future of the health care workforce, and how it can be developed in years to come to best serve Canadian patients. On Nov. 28, 2005 we released the report of our findings at the summit: Modernizing the Management of Health Human Resources: Identifying Areas for Accelerated Change. (Click here to view a summary of the report's recommendations)

We heard that if health care professionals are expected to work as a team, they should train as a team.

Imagine a hockey team where the goalie learned to play exclusively with other goalies. The centre trained with other centres, the defense went to defense school. And then when they all finished their training, we sent them out on the ice and told them to play as a team. I think we know what the results would be.

Now consider health care professionals, all trained independently - doctors train with doctors, technicians train with technicians, nurses with nurses. But they are graduating into a world where Canadian health care needs are changing, requiring a team-based approach to care. Collaborative care requires collaborative training.

Canada needs to expand inter-professional training, promoting multi-disciplinary teams to deliver care. We need to create more interim training and certification steps to improve opportunities for advancement. Especially for First Nations, Inuit and Métis health care professionals, we need to expand training and hiring. And, for foreign-trained health care professionals, we need to begin national coordination in recruitment and certification. And it needs to be now.

To respond to our health care worker shortage, Canada must make the best use of the skills that our existing health care professionals have. That means re-examining "who does what" within the health care workforce and doing a better job of matching worker skills with patient needs. How? We can do that by creating opportunities through regulatory change and work organization. We can do it by accelerating the shift to new payment methods that encourage inter-disciplinary teams. And, we can do it by resolving issues of liability in collaborative practice.

At the same time, we want our health workers to provide more years of high-quality service to Canadians, so we need to make the health care setting a better place to work. We need to use both financial and non-financial incentives to improve professional development, recruitment and retention, and quality of work life. We need to make use of mentoring programs, flexible hours and health and safety innovations to improve job satisfaction and reduce days or years lost to strain or injury.

At the summit, it was made clear that the planning we do in health human resources must be done with an eye to the future health needs of Canadians, rather than on the needs of individual jurisdictions, professions or institutions. We need to recognize that some of the policy decisions that contributed to our current work force shortages were made because of a lack of foresight, and it has taken us a long time to climb out of that hole. We need a better, broader, pan-Canadian, future-oriented approach to planning to prevent future missteps into the same trap.

The Health Council found that for many of these challenges, there are places in Canada where smart people have rolled up their shirt sleeves and got to work making a dent at solving them. We want to share some of these outstanding programs in the hope that they become the rule rather than the exception.

For instance, the Critical Care Team in the Kootenay Region of BC is a great example of real collaboration between the government and the unions to put the patient at the centre of care. Initiatives like this show that we can rethink the way our health care system and our health care workers are organized to the benefit of patients.

In a similar vein, Memorial University in St. John's has been working on inter-professional training. Their focus has been that Canadian primary health care can be delivered more effectively and efficiently by a team of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and others. They are breaking down the silos of training, understanding that if health care professionals train together, they'll understand how to work together.

What these examples illustrate is that for many of the challenges our system faces, where things go wrong, someone, somewhere has figured it out and made things better. Good ideas can and do come from anywhere, and in the interests of beating the ticking clock on health human resources, we must emulate those successes.

We're urging governments, educators, health care policy makers, professional organizations, unions and front-line workers to look to these models as they strive to improve health care delivery for our citizens.