Thank you for the question.
I'll give a bit of a response, and if colleagues want to jump in they're welcome to.
One of the pieces that the Advisory Committee on Health Delivery and Human Resources is working on, the federal-provincial-territorial committee that I talked about, is exactly that one that was raised by your colleague in terms of interprofessional education and interprofessional collaborative practice. There have been a number of--you could refer to them as pilot projects--investments in identifying best practices in the years since the health human resource strategy has been in place at Health Canada--the past five, six years. There have been roughly 11 projects, some conducted on a bilateral basis with provincial-territorial governments, some on a national or pan-Canadian basis. And the conclusion is exactly as you've stated it: a lot of good work, a lot of insight into how to make interprofessional education and interprofessional collaborative practice work. But the question now is how well that is being implemented across the country and whether the findings of those pilots have actually been translated into practical knowledge for educators or health care providers.
In this fiscal year, 2009-10, the ACHDHR, the federal-provincial-territorial committee, has set up a health education task force to look back at what we've learned, figure out what the gaps are. For example, is it that some models haven't been tested, or is the gap actually that we know what the models are, we know what the best practices are, but they haven't been implemented in a consistent way across the country? So the gap study is in the current fiscal year, and depending on what that finds, we would take forward proposals to federal-provincial-territorial deputy ministers for the next fiscal year in terms of how to move forward, how to do a better job at knowledge translation, if that's what we find the problem is.