Health committee  Thank you for inviting the Canadian Nurses Association to be part of today's proceedings. I am Barb Mildon, president of CNA. I am pleased to be joined by Josette Roussel, who is a senior nurse consultant at CNA. I am a certified community health nurse and have worked in clinica

Health committee  Excellent. Thank you very much for the question. First, in terms of harmonization of scopes of practice across the country, I will give you a very resounding and enthusiastic yes. We totally believe that would be helpful in several ways. I mentioned the concept of mobility acros

Health committee  That's a difficult question to answer. I would invite my colleague, Josette, to respond to that. But from my perspective, it means that the care that's being provided is often support care, supportive care: meal preparation, shopping, laundry, personal care, the care that may not

Health committee  The best example I can give you, as I alluded to in my presentation, is the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, where we appreciate so much the work of Health Canada in working with nurses at CNA and with others to expand that provision so that nurse practitioners could prescrib

Health committee  I don't think that it even may need to be an institution. I think it may need to be just another step that's recognized as part of those kinds of processes.

Health committee  Thank you for that question. Ironically, I would suggest that if from a purely scope-of-practice perspective, nurses in remote and rural areas are most likely to be able to work to their full scope because of the shortage of resources. From a scope-of-practice perspective, they

Health committee  I'm happy to start, and I invite Anne and others to join in. I'll be very quick. With regard to staff mix, CNA does have an evidence-based staff mix review tool which it has published. I have personally used that in my practice, most recently in the past year when we were lookin

Health committee  I'm happy to speak to that, and thank you for the funding. I know it will make a difference. Yes, I think what you're speaking to are innovative HHR practices. You're really at the heart of what needs to evolve as we go forward. In the case you've described, this is breaking do

Health committee  Again, I will speak to nurse practitioners in particular, with the recommendations we made to remove some of the restrictions from their signing various federal forms and so forth, and being able to give samples of drugs. That they can prescribe the drug, but they can't actually

Health committee  Thank you very much for the question. I will quickly add in the interest of time that I think you're speaking much to the history of the evolution of home care in Canada, which of course is not covered under the Canada Health Act, so that has always rendered home care very vuln

Health committee  Thank you. I'll speak first—

Health committee  I'll be very brief. For long-term care settings, nurses should be able to manage care in place. The Ontario government recently announced funding for nurse practitioners in long-term care settings. That means that your mother may not have had to go to the hospital in the first p

Health committee  I would invite Anne to speak to this. I'm happy to as well. Anne, would you like to start?

Health committee  I believe Paul can also respond from the practical nurse regulator perspective.

Health committee  I would add very quickly that, as both my colleagues have alluded to, wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a single definition of scope of practice and standards of practice across the country? I think that's the aim of what we need to do.