2025/06/21 by Sikdar, Saif, Chowdhury, Nashit, Lake, Deidre +1
#Community Engagement #Ethnic Minority #Immigrant #Inclusive #Newcomer #Participatory #Power Informed #Racialized #Transdisciplinary #Visible Minority
paper · doi:10.11575/prism/49015
Background: Internationally trained physicians (ITPs) or international medical graduates (IMGs) living in Canada are those who have received their academic and professional training outside of Canada or the USA. Current rules and regulations have made it extremely difficult for IMGs to get the license to practice in Canada as a physician regardless of their citizenship status and level of training. After going through a highly competitive process, approximately only 15% of Alberta IMG applicants obtain a residency position based on the number of seats allocated to IMGs via AIMGP (263 eligible candidates; 39 seats). This bottleneck situation and the time and cost of re-applying gradually increase frustration among IMGs. Our interest was to look at the employment situation of IMGs in Canada and what viable pathways existed for them if interested in pursuing an alternative career in health. Our research was conducted to identify the factors that IMGs took into consideration when exploring an alternative career and to identify suitable alternative career pathways available for IMGs within Canada in order to advise them accordingly. Methods: To begin with, we conducted a survey on IMGs regarding their interests in and preferences for alternative careers. Keeping the survey results in mind, we searched for job advertisements and systematically reviewed job descriptions and their qualifications (i.e. regulated versus non-regulated). We also conducted focus groups to extract the key decision-making factors for IMGs in order to identify the alternative jobs that match their interest and skills. Results: In total, we have identified 192 unique job positions comprising 47 NOC codes that could be suitable for IMGs seeking to begin an alternative career based on the short, intermediate, and long-term goals. These jobs primarily fall into two different categories: clinical (35.42%) and non-clinical (64.58%) jobs. Interestingly, we have found that around 7.35% of clinical and 29.84% of non-clinical job categories do not require any sort of license or approval from any regulatory bodies. Although most other jobs require a certain level of training, certificate, or license from the respective licensing authorities, obtaining those regulatory approvals is more tangible compared to the license to practice as a physician. Strikingly, there are approximately 17.71%, 51.04%, 29.17% and 2.08% unique categories that fall into the entry, middle, and senior-level job positions. We have further classified these job categories according to the job searching preferences of IMGs and collected information on how to qualify for these jobs. Conclusion: Although more work in this area is needed to integrate IMGs with the job market, we expect that our findings and resources will help IMGs decide on alternative career pathways.