Health committee  I think it's a matter of knowing the champions in each province. I collect names. I know people. It's a big part of what I do. It's making sure I know who the champion is in each of the provinces to reach out to because they know the issues in their province and they can bring

Health committee  I think it would absolutely be useful. Our society of obstetricians and gynecologists, as well as the societies in the United States and most of the societies in Europe, have all come forward to make statements saying that we should be doing this, so having the Canadian task fo

Health committee  I think a lot of it has to do with how strong the provincial message has been about cervical cancer. When you have a province has a very strong database, moms are watching themselves getting called to come and get their pap test—“Come for this, come for this, come for this.” If t

Health committee  It's actually related to two things. It's not just related to herd immunity, which is obviously beneficial; you're also preventing the other cancers. Men have a high risk for anal cancer and throat cancer. Yes, they don't come until much later in life and are usually things tha

Health committee  If someone has not been vaccinated as a child, then once they're past the age of 18, they will incur those costs themselves in most of our provinces. There are some provinces that will help to cover the vaccination for people who have already been diagnosed with a lesion. That's

Health committee  Absolutely. For HPV testing, we are currently going to be recommending that women get swabbed once every five years by whatever method that they do it. That's different from Pap testing. That has to be more frequent at that point in time. If someone has a negative result, great

Health committee  That's a very good question. Under the CPAC there is a very distinct guide and layout on Canadian goals on how to eliminate cervical cancer and meet our World Health Organization goals. Currently, if you go through year by year, you see we've fallen behind on those goals that we

Health committee  That is related to the cervix cancer issues. When you look at the numbers pre-2015, you'll see that our cervical cancer rate was actually dropping very nicely. It was going down right on track and in the way that we were expecting it. If you look at the projected numbers that wer

Health committee  That is obviously a very huge challenge. Currently it obviously falls under each province's responsibility to create its own program. The big issue, again, with it being just provincial is that people move. When someone crosses a provincial border, it's a little bit like startin

Health committee  That's definitely a challenge. We are currently vaccinating the majority of children across the province with something called Gardasil 9, which protects against nine types of HPV. They get two vaccinations six months apart. When someone is outside of that young children's prog

Health committee  Some of the groups that we are bringing to the table are the family medicine practitioner national societies so that they can help distribute the information to their bodies as well. Obviously, these physicians have to go through continuous medical education. We all do. It's a re

Health committee  In terms of salpingectomies, Dr. McAlpine, did they actually come out with a statement directly on that?

Health committee  I think the thing that also disturbed me the most when that data came out is that the data collection ends at 2019, and we all know what happened in 2020 and the years thereafter. If we thought there was a problem with screening going up to 2019—because I think the majority of t

Health committee  I absolutely think so. That's actually one of my desired mandates when I take over as president of GOC. I want to get all the partners at the table to talk about how to bring HPV self-testing to this entire country. As you mentioned, it really requires a strong provincial progra

Health committee  That's one of the things we've debated in discussing how to a create a program and whether you create an opt-in program or an opt-out program. As you can imagine, an opt-out program would be incredibly expensive. That would involve mailing a self-testing kit to every person who