ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Canadian initiatives to improve health professions regulation through application of interprofessional collaboration to regulatory work. In Canada, health professions regulation is rarely, if ever, a leading health care policy issue. The dominant concern of citizens, governments and the policy community is the productivity and the fiscal and political sustainability of Medicare the programme through which governments in every province and territory fund the single-payer system that provides universal access to physician and hospital services under the iconic Canada Health Act. The legislative framework for health professions regulation in four Atlantic Provinces and in Saskatchewan is a single-layer framework consisting of the distinct statutes of each self-regulating group or, in case of Newfoundland and Labrador, single professions or those regulated under the Health Professions Act. Like other Canadian reforms to health professions regulation, the concept of collaborative self-regulation emerged from an anxiety in health policy forums that structures and processes of professions regulation would inhibit health care reform.
