Public Accounts committee  I can perhaps start. Health Canada actually funded faculties of medicine to do a review of the educational requirements to receive an MD degree. It was the first such review in quite some time. One of the things we've been doing, which I think my colleagues at Infoway and oth

Public Accounts committee  Yes, as Mr. Alvarez said, Infoway, Health Canada, and a number of the provinces are working very closely with the Canadian Institute for Health Information on the very responsible ways of using the information to benefit the health system writ large, instead of the individual doc

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we've started investigating the ways that we can do it. Privacy is one of the key issues.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, thank you. Your question came back as a basis to where did we start. I want to come back to one of the points that my colleagues made. Within Canada we started across the country in very different positions. Even within provinces, you start from different positions, with so

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much for the question. As both the Auditor General and Mr. Alvarez have noted earlier today, the federal government has given significant sums of money to Infoway over a period of time. I think that does show the understanding of the federal government that this d

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chair, members, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to be here with you this morning. I first want to thank the Auditor General and her staff for their very informative reports. Health Canada is pleased that they have undertaken the task of re

Health committee  Thank you. I'd like to make some comments about health spending writ large, because we certainly do track health spending and track the drivers of health spending and that kind of information. A study done internally looking at every year going back to 1970 has shown that the i

Health committee  It should be noted that the federal government doesn't provide all care to any specific population. We provide different care to different populations. So for first nations and Inuit people, it can be different if they're on-reserve or off-reserve. We are typically providing prim

Health committee  Thank you. As I said, one of the issues is that when we get the information from the provinces, there's no differentiation with respect to ethnicity. We get a big pool and we can't pull it out. Not all reserves participate in surveys. We have continued to support specific survey

Health committee  In response to one of the Auditor General's recommendations, we are making sure there's going to be a media release this year. The report itself will be available on the website. We'll have some printed copies, but most people now are using the Internet and the web as a way of ac

Health committee  Actually, in the report itself I don't know if we note the improvements. We have more than doubled the number of indicators. We had 17; we've added another 19. In each section there's clearly an interpretation as to how this relates to an accord commitment and a narrative that's

Health committee  I think within Health Canada, as in all federal departments, we also keep track of our action and follow-up in terms of Auditor General reports. Part of each Auditor General report is obviously a response from the department on the action we plan. The Auditor General comes back a

Health committee  One of the great benefits of having the Auditor General come in, even though you're feeling that the Auditor General is always criticizing your program, is that it has people interested in the work you do. For the first time, you get a lot of feedback on the work you do. I have w

Health committee  Madam Chair, if I might just add, in regard to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, it's actually Health Canada that supplies them with their data. So the OECD data are indeed passed to them from us. The Health Council, which got the mandate in the h