Physician Migration (2016)

I worked with Professor David Wright (McGill history) at the Institute for Health and Social Policy in 2016 on a part of a project looking at several waves of physician immigration to Canada after WWII. Doctors are a source of scarce human capital in many developing countries and their movement is poorly understood. Fortunately, countries like Canada have been keeping track of the intended occupation and country of origin of their immigrants for a long time. Additionally, almost all Canadian physicians are registered in an annually-published medical directory that we went through to find the current location of doctors and the schools where they were trained. Looking specifically at South Africa, we made a dataset containing information on every South African-trained doctor in Canada for semi-census years to fit the immigration patterns of South African physicians with broader trends of immigration after WWII while tracking their subsequent movements in Canada. We then called up the ones who weren't dead (and went through the obituaries of the others) to interview them and put the narratives of their movements in comparative perspective with those from other regions for which similar methods are being applied. The study also helps to answer some questions about the changes to the Canadian immigration system which followed WWII.

Aspects of this work were presented at the 2016 Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine in Calgary.