Thank you, Madam Chairperson, and thank you to the rest of the committee.
My name is Philip Groff, and I thank you all for the opportunity to speak with you today and to share some information on injury and its prevention.
I'm here today representing SMARTRISK, a national charitable organization dedicated to preventing injury and saving lives. Our mission is to empower you through education, programming, and policy change to recognize and manage the risks of injury in the smartest way possible. We focus most of our programming efforts on young people, as they are at peak risk for injury and are prone to take risks without thinking them through. We believe if we can reach young people, traditionally a tough group to get through to with safety messaging, we could help make them smart risk-takers for life.
Our organization began 19 years ago when our founder, Dr. Robert Conn, a pediatric heart surgeon, became interested in precisely where the donor hearts he was harvesting as a member of a transplant team were coming from. He did some research and discovered they were coming from people like you and me, like our children, our nieces and nephews, people who were healthy and happy one moment, but then due to a bad decision on someone's part, or a poorly engineered piece of the environment, or a moment of inattention were fatally injured and eligible to donate their organs. Dr. Conn realized he could save many more lives by preventing injuries before they happen, rather than trying to repair them in the operating room afterwards. He left surgery and founded SMARTRISK.
Since that initial research of Dr. Conn, the data has not lost its impact. In 2009 SMARTRISK released our second national report on the economic burden of injury in Canada, a report that we have tabled with the clerk of this committee. You will see that in any given year, injury claims more than 13,000 Canadian lives and necessitates more than three million emergency department visits and more than 200,000 overnight hospital stays. It leaves more than 60,000 citizens with some form of personal disability and another 5,000 permanently and totally disabled. The annual cost to all Canadians is more than $19.8 billion, all for events that the research literature indicates are largely predictable and preventable.
At SMARTRISK we've spent the majority of our efforts in trying to protect the youth of this country from death and serious injury. As you've already heard, injury is the leading cause of death from ages one to 44, and between the ages of 10 and 35 a Canadian is more likely to die from a predictable and preventable injury than from all other causes of death combined. Getting youth to manage their risk of injury is not impossible, but neither is it easy. We've invested a great deal of time and research investigating what works and what doesn't when trying to persuade teens to make smarter choices. We've learned through research and talking to teens to avoid negative messages, with an emphasis on consequences that push our audience into denial that these events could ever affect them. We've learned to emphasize the positive benefits of making healthier choices rather than trying to scare teens straight, and we've learned to harness the enormous power of positive peer influence so that life-saving messages are spoken in a language that is native to our young listeners, which no adult remembers fully how to speak. We've also learned the importance of building supportive environments so that the healthy choices are also the easy, popular, and fun choices.
We and our partners at the other national injury organizations have learned a lot about how to prevent injuries and save lives. We have the vaccine; what we lack is the infrastructure and supports to deliver it as widely as necessary.
A number of years ago we facilitated a national consultation with stakeholders representing the domains of surveillance, research, knowledge translation, and community programming to develop a draft framework for a national injury prevention strategy. The resulting document, Ending Canada's Invisible Epidemic, called for a pan-Canadian strategy based on six pillars: national leadership and coordination, an effective surveillance system, research, community supports and resources, policy analysis and development, and public information and education.
There has been some development of each of these pillars in the subsequent years, most vividly the leadership shown by CIHR in the development and launching of the strategic teams in applied injury research grants last year, a landmark achievement, as it represents the first time that many researchers in this country will be able to devote themselves to injury prevention research as their primary vocation rather than as a sideline they pursued with passion but little support or recognition.
However, much of the development that has occurred in these areas has been led from outside government, through the dedication of various NGOs. We are still looking for national leadership and coordination on this issue and a commitment to address this epidemic that is commensurate with the magnitude of the burden.
On March 3, 2010, in the Speech from the Throne, then Governor General Michaëlle Jean read the following statement: “To prevent accidents that harm our children and youth, our Government will also work in partnership with non-governmental organizations to launch a national strategy on childhood injury prevention.”
SMARTRISK, along with the other national injury prevention organizations--Safe Communities Canada, Safe Kids Canada, and ThinkFirst Canada--stands ready to partner with the government on this national strategy.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak today. I'd be happy to answer any questions.