Certainly, and thank you for the question.
We talked quite a bit about the patients as partners or the customer service element as we were setting up the committee and the three subcommittees. We chose patients as partners as opposed to patients as service, because we believe that inherently, in the word “partner”, they need to work collaboratively with their providers—and not just work with their providers, but they also need to be educated about the system.
As an example, at the annual general meeting we presented to 90 executive teams from chambers across the province. I would hazard a guess that 60% of them—I don't want to say had no idea—did not have an understanding of the costs of the health care system. We believe that partnership means you want to be involved, not only in your health, but you want to be involved in long-term solutions. You want to have all the information at your disposal. We think when you have that information—it's always going to be emotional, sensitive, political—you can act much more as an informed participant and add a whole lot more value.
From a health perspective overall, there's been a lot of discussion over a long period of time now around bending that cost curve. We support that, but we also think that through better education, involving the public and the patients more aggressively and more and more interactively, we can bring the demand curve down.
The need for health services is not going to go away. If you're sick or if you hurt yourself, you need to see a doctor.
We think that through more engagement of the public, whether it's through a patient contract...as an example, an individual having a patient contract with their doctor: “These are your achievements. These are your meds; we need to make sure you're taking them. We understand you're smoking or you're not exercising now. We'd like to see a plan because we're interested in your health, so we're working together.”
So it's really about education and ownership of their health.
The other piece I'll mention is that we were glad, frankly, we didn't mention patient service. We respect the Patient First program in Saskatchewan, but what really came through in our dialogue is that providers and everyone in the health care system really do put their patients first. We thought, you know what? That passion is there. We see it in the providers. We now need the patients to be more engaged. They need to be partners in the discussion.