Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Andrew Padmos. I am a physician, a specialist in hematology, and the CEO of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, an organization created in 1929 by an act of Parliament to regulate and set standards for the education, training, and certification of specialists, physicians, and surgeons. We now have 42,000 members, of whom 30,000 are active specialists in practice in Canada. I myself continue to practise hematology, although I go to Halifax once a month to do so.
We are here because of concern about the health of the health system. It is in trouble. The health system does not have the capacity to address all of Canada's needs. If you feel it does, it's probably because you're well educated, affluent, and influential. There are many people in large sectors of Canada, both geographically and socio-economically, who are suffering on a regular basis because of the inability of our system to deliver what we expect and what we promise our own family and our close working relations.
We have three recommendations. Canada self-evidently needs a stable, high-quality, and sufficient supply of physicians and other health care professionals. Specialist physicians are in short supply in many areas because of deficits in production, difficulty in retention, poor distribution, and inadequate deployments. Half of the internal medicine specialists in this country are over 55 years of age. More than half of the general pathologists in this country are also ageing rapidly, and our production is not replenishing the ranks of those important specialists. We're counting on making up these deficits by stripping human resources from less developed countries, bringing people in through shorter and shorter routes to certification and recognition.
Our first recommendation, therefore, is to invest in health human resources. This means improving the capacity to produce. It also means improving our analytic capacity. We don't actually know where the physician resources are in this country, where they're going, and what will become of them.
Our second recommendation has to do with the fundamental role of research. It is fundamental to health care quality and patient safety, and it is beneficial to the economy. Every dollar invested in research produces six dollars of local economic benefit. In my lifetime in practice, which is now just over 30 years, we've seen important advances in patient care and the cure of diseases. We didn't have Gleevec in 1972 when I graduated from medicine. It now cures chronic myeloid leukemia. We didn't have Herceptin, which has given hundreds of thousands of women extra years of life and sometimes the opportunity of a cure. You have to have sufficient pathology resources to do estrogen-progesterone receptor tests accurately and in a timely fashion. We didn't have PET scanning in those days to do accurate diagnostics. We had to open your belly to take your gall bladder out, because we didn't have laparoscopes.
In order to address this, we think we should expand and sustain the percentage of GDP invested in research, ideally targeting the 3% of GDP figure that our neighbours to the south have been able to maintain to the benefit of patients in that territory.
Our third recommendation centres on the use of electronic medical records. This is the fastest route to quality, safety, and cost containment. Canada has struggles, both locally and nationally, in the delivery of the promise of electronic connection. But there are many examples of success in this area.
In summary, the system is in trouble. We think focused effort, federal leadership, and sufficient investment is needed to make a difference.
Thank you.