Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nick Busing, president and CEO of the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada. My association, AFMC, represents the 17 faculties of medicine in Canada. We have a tripartite mission: undertaking health research to improve th

Finance committee  Thank you for your question. In our presentation, we've referred to direct costs but, in our previous presentation, we talked about indirect costs. There are four very important components to research, one of them being indirect costs. You know what they are. Like the Associati

Finance committee  As Mr. Maes told you, the percentage moved from 25% to 26% last fall.

Finance committee  My research, perhaps not, but I can give you a suggestion that if you look at a number of the curves--and I alluded to them--if you look at the retirement curve for physicians, if you look at the numbers of nurses who go to another discipline, who we currently need, we're talking

Finance committee  We are in the midst of a rapid expansion in medical schools. As you may know, we were at a low point after some cuts in the early 1990s of about 1,500-plus medical school positions; we now have 2,300. We do have some plans to increase the campuses in all of the provinces and take

Finance committee  How we move forward is a rather challenging and broad question, and I'm sure there's lots of wisdom around the room. Health research is what I'm talking to you about today. To be honest with you, I want to emphasize that it's a key component of moving forward in that manner. In

Finance committee  In our view, there is clearly some urgency. Of the acceptable grants put before CIHR for funding, less than 25% were funded; that, to us, is a significant mark. My association is currently doing an assessment of what we describe as scientists at risk. They are both PhD scientis

Finance committee  No, I appreciate what you're saying. There are some very specific evaluators you can look at, and CIHR has developed some outcome measures that are flagged on their website. That's why I say you need a long-term vision. This is not about something you can measure in a year or t

Finance committee  You've named three of them. There's a significant component about improving the efficiency of our system and how it works. There's a significant component around basic research. There's a significant component about population health and how we improve population.

Finance committee  CIHR is one of the organizations that's funded, and other organizations have appeared before you; the Heart and Stroke Foundation does funding, which should hopefully impact on heart disease. The other agencies will do some funding that has indirect impacts on health, if you're l

Finance committee  I personally, from my background as a family physician, share your perspective, and so does the association. What we're doing in medical school education is one of the direct ways of impacting on it, and most of the expansion in medical schools that I've alluded to is in distant

Finance committee  One quick fact, and then I'll give you a number. If you look at CIHR's funding compared with that of NIH, which is more or less a similar organization in the United States, and you adjust for population, CIHR has approximately one-third the funding that NIH has, adjusted for popu

Finance committee  I agree there's a fair amount. In fact going back to the original questions, if you look at where research is done, the private sector in Canada does relatively less research when compared to many other jurisdictions, and there is larger support from our government. So I would ar

Health committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair. We did circulate a document that is my version of a PowerPoint presentation. I would ask you to perhaps follow along with me, because I'm going to refer to some data on it, and some of my comments may be a bit out of context unless you have it.

Health committee  On pathways to medical practice, we're talking about the need for a summit on pathways to practice. We think we should bring all the players together, the stakeholders, to exchange perspectives and try to rationalize the complex system of six assessment centres in a national stra