Certainly.
Thank you very much for the question.
Yes, you are correct, infertility is on the rise in Canada and is of great concern. It's due to many factors, but one of the largest factors is the increasing age at which women are choosing to have their families. There are other issues as well, as you are aware: obesity, smoking, and sexually transmitted infections.
But whatever the cause of infertility, it is actually written into the act that the agency does have a mandate to educate the public about infertility. This has been part of our outreach in terms of starting to explore who else is engaged in educating the public about infertility. Also, where are the gaps in that education and how can we as an agency best fill those gaps?
A project that's under development is looking at what young people in the school system are taught about infertility. In the school system we spend a lot of time teaching young people about how to prevent fertility at an inappropriate age, as you know, but there's not a lot of emphasis on the issue of, yes, we do not recommend people perhaps getting pregnant at 16; however, this does not go on forever in terms of your window of opportunity. That's one project under development. As well, we already have phase one of our website in place, with questions and answers about that, and we're working on phase two.
The second part of your question, if I recall, sir, was about our outreach strategy.
One of the key issues of being a regulatory agency is understanding extremely well the field that you're regulating in. We've had an extensive outreach strategy to identify not only the patient groups but the professional side.
We've established relationships with the Infertility Awareness Association, IAAC, which is one of the major patient groups in Canada, as well as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans Parenting Network. These agencies have helped us learn more about patients' concerns in this area. They've also had the opportunity to educate our board about what the patients' concerns are.
On the professional side, our outreach has been to two major groups, the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, which is a subset of physicians who specialize in this area, and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, and then other groups, such as, for example, the Canadian College of Medical Geneticists, and the Canadian family physicians, first of all to find out what their challenges and issues are in this area and also to start to already educate about the act, its provisions, and the kinds of things that we will need to be overseeing as the regulations are brought into force.
