Good afternoon.
Like Mr. Knight, we are pleased to have the opportunity to appear before the committee this afternoon. My name is Simone Thibault, and I am the executive director of the Centretown Community Health Centre, which is located just a few blocks from your offices.
I'm also a board member of the Canadian Association of Community Health Centres, CACHC for short. It is in that capacity that I'm here today, along with my colleague, Scott Wolfe, who's the CACHC federal coordinator.
The Canadian Association of Community Health Centres supports community health centres across Canada to increase access to high-quality local health care and to improve the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities as a whole. There are currently more than 300 CHCs across Canada, although they often go by different names from province to province.
Included in these 300 community health centres are the CLSCs in Quebec, such as the one in Rimouski.
They include Saskatchewan's cooperative health centres, such as the Prince Albert Co-operative Health Centre, and they include Alberta's and Ontario's CHCs, such as the Boyle McCauley Health Centre in Edmonton, the Chatham-Kent Community Health Centre in Chatham, Ontario, and the Parkdale Community Health Centre in Toronto.
In fact, examples of community health centres can now be found in all provinces and territories; however, only a small fraction of Canadians to date have access. In nearly every province, Quebec and Ontario being minor exceptions, CHCs are far too few in number, and where they do exist, they are drastically underfunded.
Let us tell you a little more about what CHCs do on the ground and how this informs the five recommendations that we are presenting to you today.
Community health centres are comprehensive, front-line, primary health care centres. They bring health care providers such as family physicians, nurses, dieticians, therapists, and others together out of their individual isolation to work as a collaborative interprofessional team. This means that people receive comprehensive care from the right providers and at the right time. These diverse health care providers are supported to work to the full scope of their training—this is where we count on the colleges—making the best use of our precious health care resources.
But more than simply making front-line care more integrated and comprehensive, CHCs couple these team-based primary care services with health promotion programs, social services supports, and community programs—especially health promotion—that emphasize illness prevention and well-being rather than simply treatment. It means that a health care provider who encounters issues facing the health of an individual or a family that lie outside of his or her capacity to treat someone—for example, poor diet linked to poverty—can connect the patient or family to in-house resources that can pick up the next steps of the journey towards health.
As a result of this integrated approach, various research studies have found that community health centres provide effective and cost-effective care, achieving better overall outcomes than treatment-focused medical models.
Our full budget submission elaborates on these points in further detail, along with further rationale underscoring the need for investment in key areas of health and health care. What we would like to share with the committee here, based upon our work on the ground and what we are seeing in communities across Canada every day, is the following.
We in Canada are veering dangerously toward an interconnected crisis of poverty, inadequate housing, and illness, and a consequent tsunami of demand on our health care system. We must do a better job—that's clear—of preventing these crises and the tsunami.
I'll move it over to Scott.