Health committee  It's a tricky question. I think, ultimately, it's something that should be looked at, but it also depends on how that's done. The provinces in and of themselves know their context best, or should, and they should be collaborating with the specific regions, the communities and the medical schools in those regions.

Health committee  I can absolutely answer the six questions, yes. I appreciate it. When it comes to how the actual residency matching process works, essentially in our final year of medical school we go through an electives process where we choose specific locations and programs that we want to visit and rotate through.

Health committee  That is at the provincial government's discretion. Essentially how it works is there is supposed to be a health and human resources allocation for these spots where they look at the needs of the communities, the need for specific types of physicians in those places as well as predefined spots that determine the specialists, and those spots are then available to make application to.

Health committee  Absolutely, and, yes, Santanna had to step out. She actually had to get to another space to talk about this exact issue. When it comes to engaging residents and medical students in more rural areas, ultimately if you look at it from the perspective of “as early up in the pipeline as possible”, of course, the best way to recruit people to a region is to recruit the people from that region, so the opportunities for people from rural locations to matriculate into medical school has to be looked at.

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. It was in regard to the point about unmatched graduates in our country. That is a significant piece of burnout for students. Imagine going through all of the necessary stages to get into medical school, being in the single digits of people who get in, and then going through medical school learning everything you need to know, getting your clinical rotations finished, building an application to apply to the position you want to serve your community within, and then not getting it, not being matched at all to anything.

Health committee  Yes, very enthusiastic head nodding. Thank you.

Health committee  I can speak to that. It's a fantastic question. I am someone who wants to go into family medicine, so maybe I'll be biased towards this. Santanna is as well. It's a very good question and something that, as we've been talking about, is very specific to the region and to the people who are entering medical school.

Health committee  If you want to explore that question, you can ask Santanna.

Health committee  Finally, both preventative and reactive mental health supports need urgent funding. In our 2017 CFMS member survey, it was reported that around 37% of Canadian medical students meet the criteria for burnout. This is a staggering figure, and even more frightening is that it is a prepandemic one.

Health committee  Perhaps there can be confusion on how those issues impact students and what components are missing that impact us as learners, so I want to take a few minutes to break this down for the members of the committee. One thing that is top of mind for all medical learners is the residency matching process.