Thank you, Madam Chair. I certainly appreciate all of the presentations.
Before I proceed, I just can't let one comment go unremarked. I am also from British Columbia, and last year I attended an amazing conference about health care innovation and the projects that were happening that were funded both federally and provincially. I just wanted to reassure Ms. Murray that great work continues even to this day.
I had to actually just make that particular comment.
I think there are a few things that have stood out for me. One, I really appreciate Dr. Valade's comments around the opportunity within the federal government and where we're going with alternatives, whether it be chiropractors or other services. I think those are very valuable.
I really like the comment around a special fund for rural and remote. At some point we need to do some uptake on that. But there are two areas that I would really like to focus my five minutes on. We hear about--and I think I'm hearing the same--great innovation happening across the country. How are we going to bring it altogether and create that actual change?
We talk about collaborative care. We know we have pockets of great work. What do we need to do to actually make that a reality?
The other piece I can focus on--and I'll open this up to everyone, both of these questions--is the potential use of physician assistants. But I also appreciate that in our primary health care system, the way we pay doctors doesn't really allow for any kind of collaborative care. It's very difficult for nurse practitioners, nurses, to work in a primary care environment with family physicians by virtue of our payment model. So would physician assistants add value, or do we really need to look at a collaborative primary care team? Someone who knew that we were doing this study, who is a physician, said we should have the foreign-trained doctors be physician assistants as a pilot project.
I want to throw all those comments out and open it up to everyone. Again, it's around innovation and how do we actually create change with all the good things that are happening, the interdisciplinary team, and where we go.