US Healthcare Workers Are Moving to Canada in 2026: What Hospitals Need to Know

How the Cross-Border Talent Shift Is Changing Healthcare Recruitment, and How Employers Can Compete for It

A hospital HR team building its 2026 staffing plan is working against a different labor market than it was a year ago. The story is no longer just that Canadian provinces have sped up licensing for internationally trained nurses and doctors. Two distinct forces are now pulling healthcare talent toward Canada at the same time, and the health systems that understand both are the ones filling roles fastest.

The 2026 Shift:
Two Forces, One Destination

The first force is happening inside the US immigration system, not at the Canadian border. Foreign-trained physicians and nurses already practicing in the US on temporary visas are running into a well-documented backlog. Becker’s Hospital Review reported that roughly 10,000 foreign nurses are held up by US visa retrogression, forcing health systems like Sanford Health to cut planned international nurse hires by more than 75 percent. The American Medical Association has separately raised concerns with US Citizenship and Immigration Services about the green card backlog facing foreign-trained doctors already working in American hospitals. A new US$100,000 H-1B visa processing fee, introduced in September 2025, adds further cost to that pipeline. For this specific group of internationally trained clinicians, Canada’s more direct path from work permit to permanent residency is becoming a comparatively easier route to the same career.

The second force is Canada actively recruiting. This is a distinct, deliberate effort rather than a side effect of US policy, and it is showing measurable results. CTV News reported that British Columbia’s targeted campaign brought in more than 400 US-trained healthcare professionals between March 2025 and January 2026, including 89 physicians, 260 nurses, 42 nurse practitioners, and 23 allied health workers, drawn from more than 2,750 applications. Critics quoted in the same report called the numbers a drop in the bucket relative to the province’s overall vacancy rate, a useful reminder that recruitment wins do not by themselves close a structural shortage.

Both forces point the same direction. Whether the candidate is an internationally trained nurse stuck in a US visa queue or a US-licensed physician responding to a provincial recruitment campaign, Canadian hospitals now have two live, sourceable talent pools that did not exist in this form a year ago.

The HR Bottleneck:
Knowing Talent Exists Is Not the Same as Hiring It

None of the above does the work for a hospital’s internal HR team. A bigger, more visible applicant pool still has to be screened, verified, and moved through the right channel, and every province and increasingly every private recruiter is working the same pool at the same time.

The practical bottleneck usually sits in the same three places:

• Provincial credentialing (BCCNM, CPSBC, NNAS, and equivalent bodies elsewhere) still requires role-specific documentation regardless of how motivated the candidate is
• The one-year Express Entry threshold now excludes some candidates who would have qualified in 2025, so sourcing plans built on last year’s criteria need a second look
• Ethical recruitment standards, including alignment with the WHO Code of Practice and a firm line against sourcing from countries facing their own health workforce crises, still apply and still carry reputational risk when ignored

Recruitment also is not retention. A hospital that fills vacancies from this new pool without addressing why existing staff leave is solving half the problem.

The Solution:
A Partner That Clears the Bottleneck

This is the part of the 2026 landscape that rewards a hospital with an operational partner already in motion. Global Recruitment Experts works with hospitals and health systems to convert this shift into filled roles by handling the parts that slow internal teams down.

We:

• Build nurse and physician pipelines from both talent pools described above, US-based internationally trained clinicians and US-licensed professionals responding to relocation interest
• Manage documentation across provincial regulators (including BCCNM, CPSBC, and NNAS) and current IRCC requirements, so internal HR teams are not tracking every threshold change themselves
• Structure sourcing plans against the current one-year Express Entry rule and PNP allocations, not last year’s criteria
• Support onboarding, relocation, and retention planning, not just the initial hire
• Operate within the WHO Code of Practice and Canada’s ethical recruitment standards throughout

Hospitals that treat this as an active sourcing strategy today will be staffed while the ones still relying on 2025 assumptions are still writing job postings.

Learn more about our Healthcare & Medical Recruitment services.