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Comment by goatsi | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare would be much worse without immigrants.

In Canada, immigrants make up

    23% of registered nurses
    35% of nurse aides and related occupations
    37% of pharmacists
    36% of physicians
    39% of dentists

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ca...

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This is a pretty misleading stat. It appears to be counting people who immigrate at a young age and are then trained in the Canadian system. That isn't expanding the pool of healthcare workers, unless there were somehow a shortage of applicants. That absolutely is not the case for physicians, where every year the med school applicants vastly exceed the number of spots.

So what should really be counted is foreign-trained immigrants who were able to have their credentials considered equivalent, and entered directly into employment.

Yeas, exactly. Otherwise this shows the real problem with the health sector; it is undervalued, underpaid and thus requires cheap labor with less accrued wealth to maintain its labour force.

Canadian doctors and nurses do fine financially, but there aren't enough of them because Canadian healthcare is a command economy. The government sets a total cost it is willing to pay for healthcare and then sets the number of positions for doctors and nurses based on that budget, not market demand. That's how Canada is in the insane position of being a first world country where 15% of the population doesn't have a family doctor.

Retirement or nursing homes are a different story, and aren't particularly flattering for GP's point. Those do heavily rely on temporary foreign workers (TFWs) or recent immigrants paid around minimum wage, and the quality of care reflects that. There have been numerous scandals in the last couple years during COVID regarding substandard care, with seniors not receiving food/water or being left in their own feces for days. It shouldn't be surprising when bare minimum pay results in substandard outcomes, and the ability of employers to bring in TFWs prevents wages from rising according to market forces.

I feel like you need to include "% of patients" as well to answer the question meaningfully.

Immigrants are 21.5% of the population. They are also on average younger than the rest of the population, so they will use less medical services. The average age of a Canadian actually went down this year for the first time in over 50 years because of younger immigrants arriving.

Is Canada directly importing healthcare workers or does it preferentially train immigrants for healthcare roles?

They are directly importing healthcare workers.

Is this far off from the percentage of immigrants in the total population ages 24-65?

And 100% of The Weeknd.

Apparently 21% of Canadians are foreign born so those numbers aren’t entirely out of line. Yet.

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