A Conference on the above topic took place at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, on 17 and 18 July 1984. The Conference was sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Security and was organized by the General Practice Research Unit. Over 100 invited clinicians, research workers and policy-makers took part. The majority of the participants were either psychiatrists or general practitioners, but representatives of all relevant disciplines attended.

Canada has a long history of recruiting overseas doctors, including those specializing in psychiatry, for services in their country. Today there is a strong nucleus of British trained psychiatrists, practising in Canada, in spite of which multiple vacant psychiatric positions still exist and Canadian recruitment drives for British psychiatrists continue. Approximately four years ago, following reading an advertisement in the Journal concerning opportunities for psychiatrists in Canada, I and my family emigrated. Since this time I have been active myself in the recruitment of British psychiatrists for positions in Canada and my experience, as a British psychiatrist in Canada, may be useful for colleagues who are themselves contemplating such a move.

In recent years there has been a move away from the purely literary to the numerically descriptive medical publications. This is largely attributable to a change in emphasis and direction in the medical sciences as practitioners become more ‘mathematically aware’. Sample populations are often described in terms of numbers, ratios, percentages or rates. All of these descriptors have merit in supporting the expression of methods and results in clinical trials, research and epidemiology. The application of rates can be most useful, particularly as results are not always considered in terms of simple numerical counts, but are often related to an underlying population.