Interprovincial migration of physicians in Canada: What are the determinants?

An examination of migration patterns to Ontario cities: Demarcating Ontario’s periphery

“…Additionally, the rationale for separating the data into these two groups lies in the existing scholarship on Canadian migration. A large volume of research has been conducted on Canadian immigration (Kalbach 1970;Badets and Chui 1994;Li 2002;Beach et al 2003;Reitz 2004;Chui et al 2008), inter-provincial migration (Anderson 1966;Courchene 1970;Robinson and Tomes 1982;Newbold and Liaw 1994;Finnie 1999Finnie , 2004Basu and Rajbhandary 2006;Coulombe 2006), and internal migration (George 1970;Kobayashi and Peake 1997;Ley 1999;Murdie 1998;Hiebert 1999Hiebert , 2000Hiebert , 2005. Unfortunately, an overwhelming portion of these studies focus on large cities.…”

Interprovincial migration of physicians in Canada: Where are they moving and why?

“…The connections our study [2] has made between a physician's personal characteristics and their likelihood to migrate from one province to another would be useful in the policy development both in terms of managing ensuing gaps and creating incentives to steer movement of physicians. Knowing that younger physicians are more likely to migrate and settle as they age, could allow policy makers to create incentives attractive to young physicians to draw them to provinces where they are needed.…”

“…Using unique ID, a physician can be tracked for his/her place of residence over the period of time and identify the event of migration or the change of place of residence along with other events like retirement, death and emigration; since his/her first entry into the database (for detail, see ref. [2]). …”

“…Our previous work identified individual characteristics of physicians contributing to interprovincial migration of physicians in Canada [2]. Some highlights of the results of that study are: (1) younger physicians (aged 26-30 years) are six times more likely to move than those aged 45-50 years; (2) medical and surgical specialists are 57% and 49% more likely to move than family physicians, respectively; (3) International Medical Graduates (IMGs) 1 are 33% more likely to move than those who are not; (4) compared to those residing in Ontario, those residing in any other provinces are more likely to move, for example, those residing in Newfoundland are 5.6 times more likely to move than those residing in Ontario.…”

“…It (1) attempts to determine if, and the extent to which, expected income in a province plays a role in physician's decision; (2) predicts yearly probabilities of physician's choice of province of residence; (3) examines marginal effect of expected income in a province on response (choice of province of residence) probability for physicians residing in each province.…”