About PCRC
The Physician Credentials Registry of Canada (PCRC), a division of the Medical Council of Canada (MCC), was established to provide a centralized repository for physicians’ core medical credentials. This service is designed to reduce duplication of effort by gathering, verifying and permanently storing credentials in a centralized repository.
Services
The PCRC places a physician’s medical credential documents in an electronic repository that allows this individual to establish a confidential, lifetime professional portfolio that can be shared at his or her request with an authorized licensed user, including, but not limited to: provincial and territorial medical regulatory authorities and certifying and qualifying bodies in Canada.
Physicians using the centralized repository must submit copies of certain documents to the PCRC. PCRC is responsible for obtaining verification of these credentials from the entity that issued these documents.
Every individual coming into the Canadian medical system must have valid credentials. For physicians, these credentials can include documents such as a medical diploma, medical license and specialty certificate. The only way to ensure that credentials are valid is to perform a source verification request (SVR). An SVR examines:
- The validity of the credentials on a document
- The record or history of the credentials being awarded to the individual by the issuing organization (such as a medical school having a record of issuing a medical diploma to an individual)
Upon successful completion of the SVR process, where all credentials and records have been verified, these documents are stored in the PCRC repository.
Background
In February 2004, the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Advisory Committee on Health Delivery and Human Resources released its Report of the Canadian Task Force on Licensure of International Medical Graduates. The report contained a number of recommendations intended to facilitate the integration of qualified international medical graduates (IMGs) into the Canadian physician workforce. One of those recommendations called for the development and implementation of a central credentials verification service designed to:
- Validate documents required for licensure and certification of IMGs
- Maintain a repository of verified credentials.
In 2005, in response to this recommendation, the MCC in partnership with the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada (FMRAC) and supported by Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC), funded the project to establish the creation of the PCRC. It was envisioned to provide this service to all physicians practising in Canada.
