Thank you, Madam Chair.
Hon. members of Parliament, I appreciate the opportunity to bring the perspective of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to your study of health human resources.
CIHR is the Government of Canada's agency responsible for the funding of health research and training. Our mandate, as defined in our founding act, is to excel according to internationally accepted standards of scientific excellence in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products, and a strengthened Canadian health care system.
CIHR provides leadership and supports nearly 12,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. These should be seen as an integral and essential part of the Canadian health workforce.
We in the Canadian Institutes of Health Research are convinced that research is the cornerstone for the well-being of Canadians and for an effective health system tailored to meet our needs and based on solid scientific information.
Your investments in health research lead to improved health for Canadians. Let me give you two examples.
In Canada, the death rate after a heart attack has decreased by more than half in the past decade, due to innovations in treatment and to improvements in health systems to provide timely care. As another example, when the SARS outbreak occurred in 2003, CIHR mobilized a team of 58 Canadian researchers to sequence the genome of the virus behind SARS, studies that would then lead to results in the areas of diagnostics, treatment, and vaccination.
These examples--and there are countless others--depend upon the creation of basic scientific knowledge and equally upon the successful application of that knowledge in the clinical setting. Both aspects are crucial for health improvement. We must have the capacity not only to do the research, but also to translate the results of research into better care and into an efficient, sustainable health care system, as Ms. O'Neil just told us.
This leads me to the issue of human resources, the matter before you today. It is absolutely essential that health researchers, be they scientists or health professionals, be taken into account. And we must recognize that that has not always been the case up until now.
Who are these health researchers? They are, first of all, scientists, holders of a Ph.D. and their students, doctoral and post-doctoral. These people work in the area of basic research or in the more applied sectors of health research: epidemiology, health system organization—as Ms. O'Neil just mentioned—health economics, etc. And don't you think that these researchers are confined to the university ivory towers: too often we forget that more than 80% of health research in Canada, all sectors included, is conducted on hospital campuses. Then we have the health professionals: doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists. More often than not, these people split their time between clinical duties and research. They are the key to this transfer of knowledge to clinical practice and health care organization.
But you should be aware that Canada's patient-oriented research capacity is rapidly deteriorating. In the case of physicians—and the situation is even worse for nurses—only a small proportion of them devotes a substantial amount of time to research, and this proportion is not growing.
As you see here on this graph, it is not a map of arms of mass destruction, but it does show you the total number of physicians in Canada—and we're talking about specialists. These are the ones who actually spend less than 5% of their time doing research. Now, the ones who really count, the ones who spend at least 20% of their time actually doing research, are represented by this very dark blue line here at the bottom.
Clinicians' time for research is not protected, and it's not appropriately valued and compensated. How can we compete with the increasing demands of care in the face of insufficient human resources? Time for research is never taken into consideration when staffing the health sector. There are difficulties in attracting and retaining clinician researchers; and insufficient opportunities and unclear career paths discourage the ones who have the talent and taste for it. Yet these clinician researchers are absolutely critical, not only to improving health and health care, but also to ensuring that health care professionals are trained under the scientific backdrop necessary to ensure evidence-based practice.
We need to ensure a system of renewal that prepares new health professionals for research careers. We must ensure that the system appropriately values these promising health researchers, along with creating an environment that is scientifically and intellectually stimulating. And that's what we're trying to do at CIHR. I feel very strongly that as an organization, we need to focus more time and resources on patient-oriented research.
Over the coming years, CIHR will lead a new patient-oriented research strategy to strengthen the culture of knowledge-based care at all levels of the health care system.
Our objective is not only to develop significant human resources in this sector, but also to better exploit our universal health care system. We want to know how to use—and once again, I am repeating what was said by Ms. O'Neil—the resources provided by this system: data banks, medical records that will soon be in electronic form, we hope, to provide better follow-up on patients and improve the viability and cost-effectiveness of the system itself. We have a unique opportunity to develop a niche of excellence at the international level, which will enable us not only to better serve our citizenry, but also to retain and strengthen the health industry. It is up to us to take our health care expenditures and turn them into an investment.
If we make a better effort at this, the result will be internationally recognized clinical research expertise. We will produce groundbreaking Canadian studies and, more importantly, we will improve the delivery of health care to Canadians.
To conclude, CIHR has a responsibility to provide research leadership in building the environment and the people to strengthen Canada's research infrastructure and capacity. We will fulfill our mandate. We need your continued support.
My message to you today is that research in the hospital setting is not a luxury, but the key to improved health care. One cannot plan for health human resources without integrating research at every level; it is essential to the quality and outcomes of health care.
Merci beaucoup.