Thank you.
I will try to answer the first question. I'm not sure I can provide much input for the second.
There is research that's been done on trying to reorganize primary care to try to make it more efficient, and doing some of the services you've mentioned, which is the delay of acute emergency care, which occurs because of lack of primary or community medicine initiatives. There's a fair amount of research being done, but the research funding for that pot is pretty limited. It's research that would have to compete with what's called the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for funding, and it's up against people who want to do research on new drugs, new technologies, etc.
Part of the problem, as I said before, is the issue that there's not much of a commercial interest in terms of trying to improve primary care and trying to make it more efficient. Therefore, that's not a very, shall I say, sexy topic for people to do research, and therefore there isn't much money available. Much of the work that gets done, in terms of presenting the value of money of new technologies, is industry-sponsored. When I sit on committees such as the Committee to Evaluate Drugs, in Ontario, the only research we see is industry-funded research because the Ministry of Health doesn't have the resources available to look at the cost-effectiveness or value for money for technologies that aren't being pushed by industry.
Either we have a mind change in terms of the fact that we need to provide a pot of money to evaluate existing technologies that have no commercial sponsor or we're going to still be stuck with the situation that the type of research that's being done, in terms of primary care, is fairly limited in comparison to other technologies.