Dr. Tom Freeman publishes study on the emigration patterns of Canadian physicians to the United States

Dr. Tom Freeman completed his study, Shifting tides in the emigration patterns of Canadian physicians to the United States: a cross-sectional secondary data analysis, while he was a Visiting Scholar at The Robert Graham Center for Policy Research in Family Medicine and Primary Care, in Washington D.C. in the spring of 2013.

Ontario, and Canada as a whole, faced a shortage of family physicians and other specialists in the early 1990s that had measurable negative impacts on population health. The ‘brain drain’ of Canadian physicians moving to the United States was one factor in this shortage. Following a number of changes in medical education, provincial and national policies on both sides of the border, by 1995 the emigration of Canadian trained physicians to the United States had reversed and, subsequently, dropped to the lowest level in over four decades. Developing a national health human resource strategy is needed to avoid the physician shortages of the past and must include understanding the factors that influence physician migration.

To read the entire published study visit BioMed Central.