Yes. You see, we are managing our human resources really well.
It's a pleasure to be back. I'm Judy Shamian, and I'm here in my capacity as the president of the Canadian Nurses Association. With me is Michael Villeneuve, who is the resident scholar at the Canadian Nurses Association.
I'm delighted to be here, and I'm going to focus on two separate issues. One is health human resources, and the other is a return on investment when investing in nursing research.
Health human resources--it's an issue that often feels as if we should sleep on it, because we don't stop talking about it, but it's an issue that is getting more and more acute. Based on research that's been carried out recently, we know, and we just heard, that the bust is here, and that by 2025 we will be short 60,000 nurses. We currently are short around 11,000. That's if things stay as they are, but there are additional issues that need to be taken into account, and we have some major concerns for you to consider.
One of them, for example, is that 4.3 million Canadians have no access to primary care. We know there are over 2,000 nurse practitioners in this country who provide primary care to tens of thousands of Canadians, and that's a trend we can deal with. If we had proper planning, we would not be in a position today where 4.3 million Canadians have no access to primary care. That's really difficult to consider in a country like Canada.
The other issue for us to consider is that if you're looking at what's happening south of the border, with the U.S. investment in access to health care, their investment will increase access to health care to 30 million Americans. Guess where they will be going for their general practitioners, for their nurse practitioners, and for their nurses? Currently 5% of our production in Canada in the nineties work in the U.S. They will be at our door, and with NAFTA and all the other agreements, they will be sucking up our physicians, family physicians, nurse practitioners, faculty--because they will need to prepare their own workforce eventually--and so on. So unless we do some proper planning...if we think it's 60,000, we can double, triple, or quadruple that for the coming years. We have some time to act on those issues.
Another issue to consider is the whole notion of chronic diseases and the impact we can have through team effort and collaborative work. Plenty of research shows that currently we're spending close to $90 billion--and again it's with a “b”, reinforcing Pauline's message--on chronic disease management, and that can be managed if we work differently as teams in human resources. The bottom line is that investing $100 million over five years to invest in planning and pan-Canadian work, and figuring out some pilot initiative to deliver our care differently, will pay back in spades.
Let me just reinforce the recommendation in front of you. The federal government invests $100 million over five years toward collaboratively funded Canadian health human resource planning. Over the question period we can reinforce what it can do and how it works.
Let me talk about investment in research. Again, what we are asking for is very minimal, an investment of $60 million over 10 years. So our two requests add up to $26 million a year, which is really peanuts. We need investment in nursing research, because the return on that investment is pretty phenomenal, and we have proven it in the last 10 years, where we did get investment from the federal government dedicated to nursing research. I will give you one example.
One of the studies that was carried out in one province resulted in the implementation of doing home care differently, which saved the province of Ontario $10 million a year. That's $10 million--and we are asking for an investment of $6 million per year in nursing research. That's a single study, and there are many more examples.
So investing in nursing research will help us to test different care delivery models that can be helpful in improving and strengthening the Canadian health care system. It can also help us with the areas of chronic disease management and how we can handle issues differently. Another study, for example, that was carried out that looked at how to manage wound care has saved the Province of Alberta and others millions of dollars by doing it differently, based on research generated from nursing research.
So there are two recommendations: one around human resources and one around nursing research.
Thank you.