Standardizing Health Workforce Data in Canada: Legal and Regulatory Levers for Harmonized Collection and Sharing

There is a growing awareness of the benefits of comprehensive, standardized, and accessible data on the health workforce to support more timely and robust planning. We found that provincial regulation and data privacy legislation could be better aligned to strengthen the infrastructure for high-quality health workforce planning data. This article identifies existing legal and regulatory mechanisms that enable the collection and sharing of more standardized health workforce data. We propose a framework that enables the collection and sharing of standardized data by scaling up existing leading practices in certain provinces into a more cohesive approach. Key facilitators include umbrella legislation, privacy frameworks that contemplate data use for workforce planning, efforts to collect anti-discrimination data, and secure data access infrastructure. Together, these facilitators support a viable foundation for improved health workforce data standardization and utilization for planning to improve healthcare delivery across Canada in the existing legal context.