Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
So many questions, so little time, but I'd like to continue with what my colleague was talking about, these alternate levels of care and the statistics that he brought up. Because people aren't being discharged, there could be as many as 70,000 avoidable adverse events. That statistic is just incredible. Some things were brought up today such as a different pay model. Dr. Guirguis said that the funding model that we have now is unsustainable.
It's a real challenge in our country. How do you introduce competition into health care fields within the Canada Health Act? It seems to be very challenging.
Dr. Sutherland, you talked a little bit about community-based providers. My understanding is that in Britain, for example, when people are discharged with things such as diabetes, they have follow-up right in the person's home. In other word, it avoids that expensive re-hospitalization; it pretty much cuts it right down. But in Canada it seems that we have a bias where we'll pay for the most expensive care.
The provinces will pay for a medical doctor to do a house call. My background is that I'm a chiropractor. A lot of seniors have musculoskeletal stuff. We had paramedics in here who do community para-medicine, which would cost the system a lot less, especially if you're doing these discharges and trying to avoid re-hospitalization.
I was wondering, with the research you're doing, which I understand is funded by CIHR or CIHI, has anybody looked at the potential savings if we asked the provinces not to have these biases towards different professionals? Somebody who's a midwife, for example, can actually go out and more cheaply provide in-home services to a woman who has just had a baby instead of having her keep coming in. As I said, there are all kinds of services—paramedics and occupational therapists—but they can't build a provincial plan because it seems as if there's this built-in bias. Has anybody looked at anything like that to put competition in the system?