Status of Women committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak with your committee today. I worked part-time as a prison physician for 16 years in federal and provincial corrections. I sent your committee a policy brief that has seven recommendations. These include recommendations about mother-child re

Public Safety committee  I think you can learn the answer by listening to those stories. For each woman it's a bit different, but the things that have come through that I've heard are a hope that it is possible that they can succeed, actually having people who believe in them, and community support. It's

Public Safety committee  I would say they're associated. I don't know if you could say the timing on it. I don't think so, but they're certainly associated. They certainly go together.

Public Safety committee  Sorry; you said the mental health issue preceded the drug issue?

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. As I alluded to, mental health is so interrelated with the emotional, the physical, and the spiritual. When we actually asked women what would help them to get healthy, they came up with these nine health goals over the course of the two years of the project. The Do

Public Safety committee  As she was talking, I was just reflecting on something we said at lunch. I think it was Amber who said it doesn't actually cost any money for people to be kind. You say there is difficulty with staff, maybe, or opposition. I think, frankly, your committee here has an enormous o

Public Safety committee  I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly, but we have a research grant to do this among women, and we're following women for this year. It's a three-year research project, but I think the next step will be to actually see if we can get equivalent research funding to ac

Public Safety committee  I don't think I'm the best expert on that, but that's certainly consistent with the prison health literature. There's a different profile among women versus men.

Public Safety committee  Oh, yes. They might be saying they are not quite ready yet, but they know they want to.

Public Safety committee  My experience is that most women have had very traumatic experiences. You can imagine the sort of trauma. Often when I'm listening to a woman, I have the box of kleenex between us and I'm dipping into the box of kleenex as is the woman. So there are very many traumatic experience

Public Safety committee  I would say that 90% or even 95% of the women I talk to want to turn their lives around. They want to become members of society. They want to give up their drugs. Many of them don't know how. They don't know what normal is.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  I don't know. I think that if and when the health care.... Right now the health care in the provincial system is run by a private health care contractor. So I don't know if there is any sense in which it is tracked at this point. But I would hope that if we have an integrated ser

Public Safety committee  I don't personally.

Public Safety committee  When I'm working inside the prison as a prison physician, all I see over time are the failures, as do the prison staff, because we see people coming back when they're not doing well. When people don't come back to prison, you don't know if it's because they're doing well or that