Thank you.
On what the federal government can do to help move health promotion and prevention into the forefront, a truly interprofessional and interjurisdictional approach is needed. We need to learn from models that are working in other sectors that can be applied to health promotion. I'm thinking of health economists, business models, and evaluation models in health services research right now that we can integrate to look at processes of care that are open to taking responsibility for health promotion in the primary health care sector.
As occupational therapists, we are very much into health promotion. We have models of practice that can be very flexible and allow for a move away from a focus on disease to a focus on health and wellness.
I would certainly agree with Mary Collins on outcomes; we need to have some consensus on sustainable outcomes we can measure across Canada and within different areas, regardless of what our focus is on. In this connection, I would really encourage the federal government—and it's a provocative comment, but I'm doing it quite intentionally—to move away from benchmarks of weight and more towards benchmarks focused on health and wellness beyond weight. There is a lot of evidence that focuses—