Thank you, Mr. East.
Thank you for the opportunity to present.
Jocelyn has been doing great work since 2015. I've been fortunate to join the national working group more recently as it's a portfolio I hold in the province of Manitoba.
My presentation will focus a little more on the provincial-territorial perspective to give you an understanding of how some of this work is supporting what we do.
The Red Deer recommendations, the six recommendations that came forward from Red Deer endorsed by the ministers, are a tremendous opportunity for provinces and territories to continue the good work that's been done to date in the area of concussion prevention, education, awareness and management. Some of those good things that have been done are certainly the Canadian concussion guidelines. It's a key tool that we and other provinces and territories have used as a chance for us to ensure we standardize the pan-Canadian work that we're doing. The national sport organizations are also beginning to do good work in the area of increased coach education, athlete training and prevention methods. They are starting to look more at the rules, and how rules of the game need to be altered to ensure we have a safer sport experience.
Absolutely, the work on prevention needs to continue, and sport needs to take a leadership role in this area. It's really important in increasing the ongoing network of coach training, rule changes, equipment adaptations and facility management that make sure the sport environment is safe. The national sport bodies, NSOs, have a big role to play there.
In terms of the enhanced awareness, the leadership and work being done in the PT jurisdictions, many of the provinces and territories are now looking at the protocols that have been developed nationally and we're starting to see more provinces and territories come on board to adopt them. That is tremendous news because it ensures we're all singing from the same songbook.
Parachute is leading the work with the national sport organizations and has done a great job in the last year in making progress in that area. Jocelyn mentioned the national “We Are Headstrong” campaign. It is available to all the national, provincial and territorial sport bodies, and the messages of recognize, remove, refer and return are really important messages we need to get to everyone in the sport community. We've often heard, “When in doubt, sit them out”. But once they sit out, where do we go from there? That's really important.
We're starting to see the concept of the creation of provincial-territorial sports-specific concussion working groups fall into place. Specific to my experience in Manitoba, we have created a working group. It includes sport medicine practitioners, physician expertise, provincial education representatives and experienced sport administrative staff. It has allowed us to make significant progress with our provincial sport governing bodies in the area of adopting concussion protocols.
The other thing the FPT working group has provided is the opportunity to share best practices and the opportunity to learn from good things that are happening from one province to another. It is a tremendous achievement that we can be proud of.
It's important to note that the work being done at the national level does help provinces and territories in moving toward a consistent harmonized approach, and again that we're all using the same tools.
One of the challenges we face at a provincial-territorial level is ensuring collaboration among sport, education and health. I think everyone can appreciate those portfolios reside in each province and territory, so it's really important that the communication is open and collaborative.
The other thing is that parents and athletes need help in navigating the health care system when they need care. That is an area we need to work on.
Many valuable tools have been developed around education and awareness. If you think about a national team, a university or a provincial team program, where they have access to comprehensive care through an integrated support team and medical practitioners, many tools can be used, but those models don't work at the community level.
The reality of a community sport team or a community-level coach is very different from someone who has access to a physician, physio, AT and so on. We need to keep that in mind. As has been mentioned here before, drilling down to the community level, it is really a challenge, because we rely heavily on a volunteer sector to deliver community-level sport.
It's really important to end on a positive note, though. How far we've come in such a short time is really something we should be proud of in terms of some of the recommendations that have come forward. It's a tremendous opportunity to work with all the sectors, including education and health, towards the issue of prevention. Many folks have said, “We've talked about what we do when it happens, but how can we stop it from happening?”
There are good examples in terms of a number of national sport bodies—rugby, basketball, volleyball and hockey, just to name a few—that are already doing good work in this area of addressing how they might be able to ensure prevention is looked at.
The endgame has to be active for life; that's what we want for Canadians. We need to be smart and practical in our approach, because community sport is large, complex, and again, functions with a high number of volunteers. I speak from my own perspective, but in what we think sometimes is possible from our office, we always need to remember how we can implement in a realistic and cost-effective manner. We have lots of great conversations in my shop, but we always need to think about how we're going to do this in terms of delivery.
Thank you very much. I'm happy to answer any questions during the question period.