I'm very pleased to be here on behalf of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. I'm the chief of the cardiac imaging program. We also have in our facility a cyclotron that makes PET isotopes.
First and foremost, I think the main goal for all of us is for the care of our patients to be given in a timely manner and for this timely care to be provided to the best of our abilities.
Part of why we're here is to look for solutions. There are short-term, medium-term, and long-term solutions.
There are already some initiatives in place to evaluate some long-term solutions. There's a plan for a workshop and a program to look at some of these very seriously in the fall, and we're very pleased to be part of that initiative.
We heard about medium-term solutions from the Minister of Health earlier this week, when she spoke about the CIHR grant program to try to look at alternatives to technetium.
Short-term solutions are things that we are doing on-site in the heart institute. For example, in cardiac imaging in our facility we have switched to a tracer called thallium, which can be used quite reliably to image the blood flow in the heart. We also have acquired--I think Dr. Ruddy can speak more to this--a scanner that uses less technetium. That's a new technology. We also have access to PET imaging for blood flow agents, and we do PET imaging of the heart as well, so we have been able to adapt with those situations.
In addition, our staff are working extremely hard. Many of them are coming in on the weekends to help deal with the situation.
All in all, because of our planning and our local teamwork, we've been able to weather the storm, if you will, and none of our patients are waiting significantly longer that they were before the Chalk River reactor shut down.
I should add that in the heart institute we are also helping with the production of sodium fluoride. This is thanks to the foresight of Dr. McEwan, whom you'll hear later, the University of Alberta team, and the McMaster group as well. We worked with them to submit a proposal to Health Canada, which was rapidly reviewed and approved. We will now be ready to provide sodium fluoride as an alternative in bone-scan imaging in Ottawa. We'll supply it to the Ottawa Hospital. The Heart Institute will also provide access to our cameras so that if there is patient overload at the Ottawa Hospital, we'll be able to do some on our system as well.
I think one of the key things here is that we are working together within the city and with the Ottawa Hospital. The University of Ottawa Heart Institute is also working with the other cyclotron facilities across the country and with the nuclear medicine community to try to find solutions for the problem we now face.
I should add that we were recently at the Society of Nuclear Medicine meeting, and many of my colleagues in the cardiac imaging field commended us on the initiatives that we've taken already to solve this. We're proud of that. I think we've been working together very well to try to achieve that.
That's where I'll stop, Madam Chair.