Quick answer: the 10 best healthcare staffing agencies in Canada in 2026 are Bayshore Medical Personnel, Trimax Employment, FlexCare Medical Staffing, Greenstaff Medical, Simcare Health Services, Priority Care, Goodwill Staffing and Recruitment, MEDSAG, PSI Healthcare Staffing, and UMS Healthcare Agency. This guide ranks them for both healthcare employers and job seekers, with what each does best, how they verify credentials, and how to choose, in a market where more than 30,000 nursing positions sat vacant in 2025.

No sector in Canada is under more staffing pressure than healthcare. An aging population, a retiring workforce and post-pandemic burnout have collided: the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions estimated over 30,000 vacant nursing positions in 2025, and Statistics Canada put the job vacancy rate at 5.6% in hospitals and 5.0% in nursing and residential care facilities in late 2024, nearly double the 2.9% all-industry average. For hospitals, long-term care homes and clinics, a good staffing agency is no longer a convenience; it is how shifts get covered safely. Below are the ten agencies worth knowing, why each earns its place, and how employers and job seekers should choose.

What’s in this guide

• How We Ranked These Healthcare Agencies
• National Providers and Technology-Led Agencies
• Nursing and PSW Specialists
• Established and Training-Focused Specialists
• Healthcare Staffing Agencies at a Glance
• For Employers: How to Choose a Healthcare Staffing Agency
• For Healthcare Workers: How to Get Placed Faster
• The Bottom Line
• Frequently Asked Questions

How We Ranked These Healthcare Agencies

Healthcare staffing is not general staffing. We weighted the criteria that actually matter when a worker is going to be caring for patients:

• Credential verification. How rigorously the agency confirms licences, certifications, immunization records and vulnerable-sector checks before a worker sets foot on a unit.
• Shift coverage and speed. The ability to fill nights, weekends and last-minute call-outs, the shifts that hurt most in healthcare.
• Role and specialty range. Depth across RNs, RPNs, PSWs, and allied health rather than one narrow band.
• Compliance and safety. Proper employer-of-record practices, WSIB coverage, and provincial licensing where required.
• Reach and reliability. Track record, geographic coverage, and retention of the workers they place.

The result is a mix of established national providers, modern technology-led challengers, and focused nursing and PSW specialists. No single agency is best for everyone, so we have tagged each with who it suits most.

A note on how to read this list. The agencies here are not interchangeable. A large national provider is built for breadth and remote coverage; a regional nursing specialist is built for depth in its market; a technology-led agency is built for speed and verification. The right partner depends on whether you are a rural hospital covering travel assignments, an urban long-term care home filling recurring PSW shifts, or a clinic that needs one hard-to-find allied professional. Read each entry for who it suits, not just where it ranks.

National Providers and Technology-Led Agencies

1. Bayshore Medical Personnel

Best for: national scale and community, remote and travel nursing. Bayshore is part of Bayshore HealthCare, one of Canada’s largest health-care organisations, with more than 100 locations and over 13,000 staff. Its medical personnel arm places nurses, physicians, paramedics, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and pharmacists across the country, and it has a long history of supporting remote and Indigenous communities. If you need broad national coverage and deep clinical range, it is the established leader, though its scale can mean more process than a smaller partner.

2. Trimax Employment

Best for: employers who want fast, verified healthcare placements with transparent pricing. Trimax is the modern, technology-first challenger on this list. Every worker is screened through Trimax Verify before placement, which matters more in healthcare than anywhere else: licences, certifications and background checks are confirmed up front, not discovered on shift. Trimax pairs that with data-driven matching for faster fills, transparent and itemised pricing rather than opaque markups, and a pre-vetted talent pool across healthcare and allied roles. Where the national giants win on sheer size, Trimax competes on speed, verification rigour and clarity, the things a charge nurse covering a short shift actually cares about. It is a THA-licensed Canadian agency that treats compliance as the starting point, not an afterthought.

Why verification is the whole game in healthcare. In warehousing, an unverified certificate is a compliance problem. In healthcare, it is a patient-safety problem, an unregistered nurse or a lapsed certification on a unit is a risk to real people. This is precisely why a technology-led, verification-first model translates so well from Trimax’s industrial roots into healthcare: the discipline of confirming every credential before placement is the same, but the stakes are higher, and getting it right up front is what lets a facility trust an agency worker on the floor from the first shift.

3. FlexCare Medical Staffing

Best for: travel nursing and allied health. FlexCare has focused on therapy, travel nursing and allied healthcare since 2006, and is known for a single-point-of-contact model that gives travelling clinicians one consistent recruiter through an assignment. It suits nurses and allied professionals who want structured travel contracts and employers filling longer-term coverage gaps.

4. Greenstaff Medical

Best for: high-volume nursing and PSW placement. Greenstaff Medical is a medical staffing specialist that handles large volumes of RN, RPN and PSW roles for hospitals and care facilities. Its scale makes it a strong option when you need to cover many shifts across multiple sites rather than a single hard-to-fill role.

Nursing and PSW Specialists

5. Simcare Health Services

Best for: RN, RPN, PSW and HCA coverage in Ontario and Alberta. Simcare, established in 2010, places registered nurses, registered practical nurses, personal support workers and health-care assistants into hospitals, long-term care and retirement settings. It is a solid regional specialist for facilities in its core provinces that want a partner focused specifically on frontline care roles.

6. Priority Care

Best for: long-term care and retirement-home staffing. Priority Care connects hospitals, long-term care and retirement homes with nurses, PSWs and caregivers across Canada. Long-term care is one of the most staffing-intensive and highest-burnout parts of the system, and Priority positions itself squarely around covering those facilities’ recurring needs.

Long-term care is where the strain is worst. The Canadian Institute for Health Information has documented that long-term care is among the most labour-intensive and highest-burnout parts of the health system, and Statistics Canada found that in 2024 almost one in five health workers, and one in four in nursing and allied roles, worked overtime. That churn is exactly why LTC and retirement homes lean on staffing partners so heavily: covering the gap with agency shifts is often what keeps the permanent team from burning out and leaving too.

7. Goodwill Staffing and Recruitment

Best for: in-home care plus facility staffing across roles. Goodwill Staffing provides nurse practitioners, RNs, RPNs, PSWs, HCAs and allied health professionals for both in-home care and healthcare facilities across Canada. Its breadth across home and facility care makes it useful for organisations that staff both settings.

8. MEDSAG

Best for: nursing and allied placement out of southwestern Ontario. MEDSAG, based in London, Ontario, places RNs, RPNs, PSWs and allied health professionals into hospitals and care homes. It is a focused regional specialist for employers in and around southwestern Ontario that prefer a partner close to their market.

Established and Training-Focused Specialists

9. PSI Healthcare Staffing

Best for: permanent and temporary healthcare placement with a long track record. PSI Healthcare Staffing has operated since 2002, connecting healthcare professionals with organisations for both permanent and temporary roles. Its longevity gives it established relationships across facilities that value a known, experienced intermediary.

Longevity signals stability, not just history. In a field where agencies come and go, an operator that has run since the early 2000s has weathered multiple health-system cycles and built the facility relationships and compliance habits that newer entrants are still forming. For a healthcare employer, that stability is worth something on its own: it usually means predictable processes, understood credentialing standards, and a partner unlikely to disappear mid-contract.

10. UMS Healthcare Agency

Best for: PSW staffing backed by a training pipeline. UMS Healthcare Agency, based in North York, Ontario, pairs healthcare staffing with a fast-track personal support worker training program, giving it a pipeline of newly trained PSWs. It suits facilities comfortable working with newer workers and candidates who want a route into the field through training plus placement.

Healthcare Staffing Agencies at a Glance

For Employers: How to Choose a Healthcare Staffing Agency

In healthcare, the wrong placement is not just an inconvenience; it is a patient-safety and compliance risk. Weigh these before you sign:

• Credential verification, in detail. Ask exactly how licences, certifications, immunization and vulnerable-sector checks are confirmed, and what documentation you receive. “We check” is not enough when a worker is on a unit.
• Genuine shift coverage. Confirm the agency can actually fill nights, weekends and short-notice call-outs, not just daytime roles.
• Compliance and employer-of-record clarity. Confirm WSIB coverage and a clear division of responsibilities. Our guide to temp agency compliance in Canada sets out what to check.
• Retention, not just fill rate. Ask how long placed workers stay, because churn on a care team is its own risk.
• Transparent pricing. Insist on an itemised rate so you know what sits inside the markup.

The broader question of when to use an agency at all versus hiring directly is covered in our guide to staffing agency versus in-house hiring. Trimax staffs healthcare roles with credential verification built in through Trimax Verify. Tell us what you need to cover and we will show you who we can place.

For Healthcare Workers: How to Get Placed Faster

If you are an RN, RPN, PSW or allied professional, the shortage is firmly in your favour, and agency work is a fast route to steady shifts and often better pay.

• Register with more than one agency. Each works with different facilities, so signing up with two or three widens your options. It is free to you; a legitimate agency never charges a worker.
• Keep your credentials current and ready. Licences, certifications, immunization records and a clear vulnerable-sector check let an agency place you faster.
• Be clear about availability. Nights and weekends are the hardest shifts to fill and often pay a premium, so flexibility gets you more work.
• Reliability builds your reputation. The workers facilities request by name are the ones who show up, on time, every shift.

For the full picture of how agency work works, from pay to your rights, see our job seeker’s guide to working with a staffing agency. To join the Trimax healthcare talent pool, fill out the contact form.

The Bottom Line

With more than 30,000 nursing vacancies and hospital vacancy rates near double the national average, healthcare employers cannot afford a slow or sloppy staffing partner, and healthcare workers have more choice than ever. The national providers like Bayshore win on scale and reach; the specialists like Simcare, Priority Care and MEDSAG win on focus; and technology-led agencies like Trimax win on verification rigour, speed and transparent pricing. Match the agency to your actual need, credentialing depth and shift coverage above all, and the shortage becomes manageable rather than dangerous.

One honest caveat. No agency, however good, fixes the underlying shortage; only training more clinicians and retaining the ones already working does that. What a strong staffing partner does is stop the shortage from becoming a safety event on any given shift, by covering the gap quickly with verified, qualified people. Treat an agency as a bridge that buys your permanent team room to breathe, not as a permanent substitute for solving retention, and you will get the most from this list.

Need healthcare workers verified before they arrive? Trimax Employment places credential-verified healthcare and allied professionals across Canada, screened through Trimax Verify, with transparent pricing and full compliance. Contact us to cover your shifts, and see how we rank in warehousing too in our guide to the top warehouse staffing agencies in Canada.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best healthcare staffing agencies in Canada in 2026?

Ten of the strongest are Bayshore Medical Personnel, Trimax Employment, FlexCare Medical Staffing, Greenstaff Medical, Simcare Health Services, Priority Care, Goodwill Staffing and Recruitment, MEDSAG, PSI Healthcare Staffing, and UMS Healthcare Agency. The best one for you depends on the roles you need, your location, and how much credential verification and shift coverage matter.

How do healthcare staffing agencies verify credentials?

A good agency confirms professional licences (such as RN or RPN registration), certifications, immunization records and vulnerable-sector police checks before a worker is placed, and gives the employer documentation. Verification rigour is the single most important thing to check, because in healthcare an unverified credential is a patient-safety risk. Trimax screens every worker through Trimax Verify before placement.

How bad is the healthcare worker shortage in Canada?

Severe. The Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions estimated over 30,000 vacant nursing positions in 2025, Statistics Canada reported hospital job vacancy rates of 5.6% and nursing and residential care rates of 5.0% in late 2024 against a 2.9% all-industry average, and Ontario alone is projected to be short tens of thousands of nurses and PSWs by 2028.

Do healthcare staffing agencies charge workers a fee?

No. A legitimate agency is paid by the healthcare facility, not the worker. In Ontario it is illegal for a staffing agency to charge a worker a fee to find them work, so any agency asking a nurse or PSW to pay to register or be placed is a red flag.

Which agency is best for PSW jobs?

Several specialise in PSW placement, including Simcare, Priority Care, Goodwill Staffing and UMS Healthcare Agency (which also runs a PSW training pipeline). Trimax also places PSWs with credential verification built in. Register with more than one to widen your options, since each works with different facilities.

How quickly can a healthcare agency fill a shift?

A good agency working from a pre-verified pool can cover shifts, including nights, weekends and short-notice call-outs, far faster than direct hiring, sometimes within hours for urgent gaps. Speed depends on whether the agency verified credentials in advance, which is why verification rigour and fill speed go together.

What roles do healthcare staffing agencies place?

Commonly registered nurses (RNs), registered practical nurses (RPNs), personal support workers (PSWs) and health-care assistants, plus allied health professionals such as physiotherapists and occupational therapists, and in some cases physicians and pharmacists. Range varies by agency, so match the agency to the roles you need.

Should healthcare employers use an agency or hire directly?

Both have a place. Agencies win for variable, urgent and hard-to-fill shift coverage and for credential-verified speed; direct hiring often wins for stable, permanent core roles. Given healthcare’s shortage and shift volatility, most facilities use a mix. Our guide to staffing agency versus in-house hiring covers how to decide role by role.

Are agency healthcare workers covered for workplace injury?

For temporary placements the agency is usually the employer of record and typically carries WSIB coverage, but the facility controls the worksite and keeps health-and-safety duties. Confirm the split in writing. Our guide to temp agency compliance in Canada explains who is responsible for what.

How do I choose between healthcare staffing agencies?

Filter first on credential-verification rigour and genuine shift coverage, then compare role range, compliance practices, retention and transparent pricing. Ask each agency the same questions and get the answers in writing. The right choice depends on your facility type and the roles you most need to cover.