Thank you very much, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today.
I feel as if you've all given us these universal truths that we hear over and over again, so it's very perplexing that we can't get it right. One of those truths is that there are too many people in acute care, and that people are being forced into acute care because they don't have other options. Of course, it's the most expensive and the least efficient. We all get that, and that we need to divert people into community care.
I think you also brought out a very interesting observation today, and that is that I think there is a myth that older people are burning up the system. I think each of you in a different way has refuted that. Most seniors are healthy, and the ones who have chronic diseases...if we just managed them differently, we'd be doing a heck of a lot better job. We hear this over and over again, that baby boomers and seniors will eat it all up and we won't be able to sustain medicare and health care. So I think you've helped respond to some of that.
Why don't we seem to be able to change the system? I don't know myself why we can't do that. Where do we begin? Supposedly, the health accords we have are meant to deal with that.
Is one of the questions that we need to look at who is in the ER? Do we even know? Who's going there and possibly is overrepresented in terms of what they are presenting when they go to the ER? If any of you have any research or know of research on that, I think it would be useful for the committee.
In terms of diverting people into a much more responsive community care setting and all those varieties, it seems to me that integrated primary care centres.... You've talked about the paramedics, you've talked about your day programs, for example, but why do we have so few integrated primary care centres, or what we commonly call community health care centres? Isn't that where we should be going, where you can go to something that's community based, maybe community controlled, integrated? You've got a variety of services. To me, it's just so obvious, yet we don't seem to be able to get there.
Any of you who would like to address that can respond to those two questions.