Common Standards for Medical Registration in Canada (2024)
Canada’s 13 Medical Regulatory Authorities (MRAs) operate under 13 distinct legislative frameworks that give them the authority to register practitioners in their jurisdiction. They share the common mandate of protecting the public by ensuring medical practitioners provide competent, safe, and ethical care.
One way they achieve this is by setting standards that physicians must meet to obtain registration and licensure, ensuring they have demonstrated the necessary competencies. These standards are set out in provincial/ territorial statutory instruments and interpreted and applied by MRAs through their registration policies and processes.
This document lists the standards for medical registration with a full license1 that are common across all MRAs in Canada and explains how these standards relate to the characterization of a competent physician as set out in the CanMEDS Framework2.
Individual MRA websites should be consulted to confirm specific registration requirements.
1 A medical license to practice independently without terms, conditions, restriction or limitations (other than, in some jurisdictions, that the physician is to practice only in the areas of medicine in which they are educated and experienced.)
2 A physician competency framework that identifies and describes the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve. Used here, it refers to both CanMEDS as developed by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC), and CanMEDS-FM, which shares core content but has been adapted by the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) to focus on family medicine.