Mr. Chair, honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
Our foundation, one of the first created by the federal government, was designed to support evidence-informed decision-making in the organization, management, and delivery of health services through funding research, building capacity, and transferring knowledge.
Our programs are supported by an endowment of approximately $110 million plus the significant contributions of more than two dozen partner organizations. These programs include support for applied health services in nursing research and researchers, the dissemination of research findings to those managing and making policy for the health system, and the training and support of health service executives in how to use these research findings in their day-to-day work.
Our stakeholders, therefore, are the Canadian people as well as the researchers and decision-makers working to improve the health system. As a publicly funded foundation, we expect to be held accountable and we wish to be held accountable to the Canadian people and to these stakeholders. One of our guiding principles, therefore, is transparency. We see ourselves being held accountable for two things--our fiscal prudence and propriety in the use of public funds, and the effectiveness and impact of the programs we offer. Clearly these two are inextricably linked.
For our fiscal accountability, our audited financial statements are presented at a public annual meeting and posted on our website, and in our annual reports provided to the Minister of Health. Last year, in addition, we completed external and independent reviews of our governance, our enterprise risk, our internal controls, and our investments. We have acted on the recommendations from these reviews. Next year we will be doing a repeat compliance audit of our grant and award holders.
We routinely evaluate the impact of our programs and make modifications in line with the results. Our main programs have external evaluations built into their development, and all other programs are periodically evaluated by our in-house impact and program evaluation unit. We are preparing this year for our second five-year review of the foundation's overall effectiveness by an independent, external international review panel.
We have received acknowledgments nationally and internationally for these initiatives. Our first five-year review, which was done in 2002, included the receipt of more than 200 letters of feedback from our stakeholders. The review commented on the foundation's growing reputation for innovation and responsiveness to stakeholders' needs. The review noted that, if anything, we had been over-evaluated in our first five years, and they commended us for our internationally peerless work.
In 2003 England's comptroller and auditor general identified our work as a best practice for commissioning research by government departments across England, and used us as a benchmark for their report to England's Parliament. In 2004 we were asked to speak about our work at a summit on health research of world health ministers in Mexico, a meeting organized by the World Health Organization. Last year our chief executive officer, Dr. Lomas, received an honourary doctorate from the University of Montreal in recognition of the work done by the foundation in better linking research to the workings of the health system.
The goal of our foundation is to maintain a balance between the two forms of accountability, the prudent use of public funds and the demonstrable impact of our programs. We are aware of the high risk of ever more resources being diverted to increasingly detailed fiscal and process accountabilities. Our challenge is to ensure that we are able to appropriately demonstrate accountability without doing so at the expense of the resources, flexibility, and innovation needed for our programs to have an impact in a timely way on the needs of our stakeholders and the good of the health care system.
To a small foundation like ours, Bill C-2 in its current form appears to strike this appropriate balance.
We look forward to your questions and comments.