Learning the lingo: New program teams Canadian doctors up with foreign-trained counterparts to help fill gaps in language skills

A few years ago, Dr. Eva Grunfeld got an unusual ask from a colleague. His church had sponsored a Syrian family, a member of which was a trained and experienced ob-gyn. She was learning English, but struggling to pick up medical lingo, and needed it to pass health professional licensure of any kind.Dr. Grunfeld, a professor emeritus from the University of Toronto’s Department of Family Medicine, agreed to sit down with her.“It’s one of the most rewarding things I've ever done,” says Dr. Grunfeld of the year she spent regularly meeting with this doctor.Dr. Grunfeld herself was once a newcomer to Canada, and she and her family could not speak English. “I had a great deal of empathy for the situation. And it had such tangible benefits. In medicine, unless you’re saving people’s lives, the changes are long-time. But this really changed the whole family’s future.”The Syrian doctor successfully went through the licensing process and is now working as a midwife.Dr. Grunfeld later got connected to ACCES Employment in Toronto, a nonprofit employment agency helping people integrate into the Canadian job market. She worked with them to develop a program that could offer the same benefits to more people. It’s called Health English Language Pro (HELP) and it partners a foreign-trained doctor with a volunteer physician for virtual or in-person chats once a week for 12 sessions. Registration to take part is open now. Language gapThere are 250,000 immigrants in Canada who trained elsewhere as healthcare professionals. Just 67% of those who were licensed doctors at home work here in healthcare—and not necessarily as physicians. Gaining licensure is complex in Canada. To become a physician, there are several steps and many must complete a residency program for which 1,007 international medical graduates were not matched to a position in 2023.But a key to passing exams and performing well in interviews, or satisfying the requirements for a career as, say, a researcher, nurse practitioner, midwife or administrator, is being proficient in English and understanding the “inside baseball” of Canadian healthcare.“I call it the secret language of medicine,” says Dr. Grunfeld of the lingo and abbreviations used in doctor’s offices. There are also things to understand about the medical culture in Canada and expectations around things such as patient consent and privacy.“There’s nowhere to formally learn this,” she says.Filling the gap with language and culture training seemed a good fit for ACCES Employment. Cameron Moser, director of services and program development, says the organization works with many different sectors, but has just one longstanding program in healthcare. “It’s unclear how to support individuals who were primarily facing barriers because of licensure,” says Moser, who has turned down program proposals in the past because they lead to lower-skilled, lower-paying careers. “A lot of our clients move into jobs in clinical research, in healthcare administration, so we really focus on making sure people have high quality employment.”ACCES, working with Dr. Grunfeld, ran a HELP pilot last spring with four pairs, with a University of Toronto graduate student running an assessment. The participants reported loving the program but wanted more guidance.The agency has created materials to help steer conversations. ACCES’s primary role is to offer a way for people to register and assist pairs with scheduling. Moser says the organization is seeking funding to further bolster the program, which is open to people across Canada.Mutual benefitsDr. Jeff Sisler, who’s retired from family practice and the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Manitoba, participated in the spring pilot—he’s a longtime colleague of Dr. Grunfeld’s and was recruited by her. “I retired two years ago and spent most of my career working with internationally trained doctors. I felt this was a good way to use what I know after years of practice to help these doctors succeed in a new country.”He was paired with a young doctor trained in Nigeria whose English was already strong. “We talked a lot about the characteristics of healthcare here,” he says, informing her about how the Canadian approach focuses on the individual and patient rights—and how team-based care works.“It gave me a view into a life and a set of challenges that are different than my own. It was extremely interesting and educational and moving at times.” She’s now working in a healthcare research position and making her way through the licensing process, with the aim of working as a physician in Canada in a few years.Dr. Grunfeld’s goal from the start was to create a program that filled a gap for newcomers and helped them get closer to their goals, but also make sure the volunteers—often, she expects, they’ll be retired doctors who want to share their expertise—get something out of it.She says the program is not a mentorship, as that has formal connotations. It’s meant to be about two doctors talking as equals, and the experience should help them both.As well, it benefits everyone to have more trained professionals working in the most meaningful roles they can in Canada. “I say it’s a win-win-win, because it’s a win for health care,” says Dr. Grunfeld. “The program is not a panacea; I’m not in any way suggesting that it's going to solve all the problems. But it's an important first step down that road.”

Learning the lingo: New program teams Canadian doctors up with foreign-trained counterparts to help fill gaps in language skills

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