Explaining unequal access to the medical profession: licensing policies for immigrant physicians in Canada and the United Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the Global North increasingly relies on internationally trained family physicians to address labour shortages, countries diverge in their licensing policies and control over access to the medical profession. This thesis analyses the causes of internationally trained family physicians’ licensing policy divergence between Canada and the United Kingdom. Both countries attract a significant number of internationally trained family physicians, yet access to the medical profession differs. I argue that different institutional arrangements determine the entry and alignment of licensing actors to influence the policy making process, thereby shaping the extent of professional closure by the medical profession. Using theory testing process tracing, I demonstrate that Canada’s federalist system permits greater and more powerful veto points to crowd out other actors, thus retaining a high degree of professional closure. In contrast, the UK’s unitary state enables greater interaction with other actors involved in ITFPs’ policy making process, resulting in fewer veto points and less dominance by the medical profession to inhibit professional closure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".