Hey there,

It's 6:15 on a Tuesday. The physician left forty minutes ago, home for dinner, coat gone from the hook. The desk beside her office is still lit. Someone is clearing the fax tray, rebooking two no-shows, and printing tomorrow's charts before the next shift starts.

Nobody has ever asked that person how they're doing. Not nationally. Not once.

Here's what's strange about it. Physicians have the Canadian Medical Association's National Physician Health Survey — the 2025 edition is where we got the good news that burnout finally fell, to 46%. Nurses have their own national wellness data. And in 2021, Statistics Canada ran the only national survey of Canadian health care workers' pandemic experience: 24 occupations in scope, from physicians and nurses to paramedics and even firefighters. Not one of the 24 was a clerical or administrative role.

It isn't that nobody counts this work at all — that's the part usually got wrong. Statistics Canada counted 32,410 people employed as "medical administrative assistants" in the 2021 Census, and about 118,000 administrative officers and receptionists working in Canadian health care settings. The jobs exist in the labour data.

The gap is narrower and stranger than "nobody knows they're there." CIHI's Health Workforce Database — the closest thing Canada has to a national registry of who staffs the system — tracks more than thirty health occupations, including several nobody regulates, like personal support workers. Not one of them is a front-desk or ward-clerical role. Unit clerks and ward coordinators don't even have an occupational code of their own; they're scattered across three general clerical categories. So the people who hold a ward's day together appear in Canada's health workforce nowhere, and in its labour statistics only in pieces.

The honest caveat: this is starting to change from the bottom up. An Ontario hospital-workers' union surveyed its members in 2024 — clerical staff included — and found 62% reporting exhaustion or high stress. A 2024 pan-Canadian public-health study counted 101 administrative assistants among its respondents. Real data, real findings, and the kind of thing that could scale. But union and study samples aren't a national number, and a national number is what moves a budget line.

So: reply and tell us about the person who does this at your clinic. We're opening a small space here for those stories, and we'd like the first one to be real.

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