Thank you very much, Madam Chair and committee members.
I am pleased to be here today with my colleague Leanne Kitchen Clarke to speak with you about the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer.
Cancer is a complex set of over 200 diseases, making a single solution to address the disease a challenge. I'm here today to tell you about some highlights of our work, particularly related to shared priorities between cancer and other chronic diseases and aging.
I would like to tell you a bit about the partnership, since we are a relatively new organization. The Canadian Cancer Society is one of the major charities in the cancer field you'd be aware of; we are not a charity nor an advocacy organization.
We were created by the federal government, in 2007, with an initial mandate of five years and funding of $250 million. We are very grateful that the government recognized the progress being made by the cancer strategy, and it renewed our mandate and funding for another five years, from 2012 to 2017.
All our work is done in a collaborative way, with and through partners across the country. To advance this work we have over 400 advisers involved in working groups and networks from cancer and chronic disease across Canada. This allows us to leverage the expertise that exists in the country and share knowledge, skills, and best practices to have a greater impact. For instance, in the area of colorectal cancer screening, we chair a network of program leads and experts in screening from the provinces to accelerate program implementation in Canada. That has happened through the collective effort of this network.
Our board consists of 19 stakeholders, including provincial deputy ministers, the Canadian Cancer Society, the Canadian Association of Provincial Cancer Agencies, cancer survivors, regional representatives with backgrounds in health and cancer, and an aboriginal person, among others.
The term “cancer control” has a World Health Organization definition, and it broadly covers a population approach to reduce the burden of cancer. Through prevention, screening, and early detection, measuring the performance of the system to inform quality initiatives, and assisting patients and families through the cancer journey, whether they survive or die of their disease, the full continuum is involved in controlling cancer.
I will not be getting into the areas of screening, diagnosis, and treatment today, given the time we have; I will focus on prevention and research. The snapshot I've provided to the clerk does cover all our initiatives, and we will follow up with additional copies for all the members.
In the work of prevention, cancer shares many common risk factors. This is where we collaborate with the Heart and Stroke Foundation and other organizations to advance our collaborative efforts.
Moving to page 4, I'm going to talk a bit about the statistics of cancer and aging. On page 5 you will note that between 2007 and 2031 it is expected that new cancer cases will increase by 71%. The population will only increase by 19% over the same period, with 40% of women and 45% of men developing cancer.
On the next page you will note there is a strong association between age and the increasing number of cancer cases. This is a result of the aging process, in part, and certainly affects the growing number of cases in the population as it's aging.
On page 7 you can see that survival has improved, with relative survival at 62% for five years, and 58% for 10 years. This is very good news, but this means we're going to have a growing population of people who are living with cancers and that the population will largely be an aging population.
The other aspect of this is comorbidity; that is, people living with diabetes and cancer, or with heart disease and cancer. That is one of the factors we are facing as a health care system.
On page 8 you see that we move into discussing the strategic priorities of the partnership. The framework indicated on page 9 is our strategic framework going forward for 2012 to 2017. This describes our vision, which is a shared vision by the cancer community: the goals, mission, strategic priorities, and core enabling functions, along with objectives we are going to achieve in this period.
Most importantly, I want to emphasize our role, which is to leverage the investment that already exists in cancer across the country, which is usually described as over $6 billion. Our funds are to leverage the whole system to be more effective. And that's just the way the strategy is implemented.
We work with and through people to develop collaborative action, to share best practices, and to ensure that people from B.C. can share their best practices with those in Ontario, and Ontario with the other provinces as well. So it's a very collaborative approach.
Quickly, on page 10, in the area of prevention, our major initiative is a strategy of drawing together coalitions linking action and science for prevention. This really supports the prevention efforts across provinces to work better together and to ensure they're able to accelerate action in their jurisdictions in the prevention agenda.
I certainly can provide more detail to the committee about that.
On page 11, we wanted to raise that we've launched a major research study called the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project, a cohort study made up of five regional cohorts. This federated national platform is looking at the interactions between genetics, lifestyle, and environment and will be a major research platform for at least the next 30 years.
Page 12 describes the study. However, the stage we're at right now is that the regional cohorts are recruiting participants. What we see in the next mandate is that we will increase opportunities for Canadians to participate in the study in those provinces and territories where they aren't currently having regional studies, and in addition, we'll be working with the cardiovascular community to deepen the capture of cardiovascular indicators in the study, all of which will make this a very rich platform.
The final thing I'd like to mention is palliative and end-of-life care. Clearly, 50% of patients with cancers will die of their disease and we know many patients and families are not prepared for end-of-life decisions and conversations. So we're working with the Quality End-of-Life Care Coalition of Canada's blueprint for action, to support its efforts to ensure that we are able to advance palliative care in the country.
We also report on the system and we've provided that to the clerk.
We do system performance reports, and this is an important aspect of our work so that we can actually monitor how the system across the country is performing and work with the representatives of cancer agencies and the health care system to look at how they can make improvements that create greater coherence and actually overall respond to the needs of Canadians in the most effective way. We've had two reports and we will have a third in December, the 2011 report, which will also continue to enrich our understanding of how services are being delivered and guidelines are being adopted.
The next slide is just to say what we use to inform our work. We use evidence, we learn from the experience of patients and their caregivers, we have a video series on our portal called “The Truth of It”—stories by Canadians on their experiences—and we engage with the health system and the cancer system to make our changes.
Finally, I encourage you to visit our website www.partnershipagainstcancer.ca or our portal, which is a partner portal with more than 30 partners, called www.cancerview.ca for additional information about the work we've been undertaking in our first mandate.
Thank you.