Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much, Laurie, for your testimony and for sharing that very personal story, how it has impacted your life, and how it has impacted others around you. I notice you've been very busy with the Cancer Society, Gift of 8, and different campaigns. You've been a real champion for different causes, so thank you for all you've been doing. It's great to meet a Canadian like you, for sure.
We've been listening to testimony from other groups as well. As a committee, we ask what we can do at the national level? We can write a recommendation to the minister and to Parliament, around strategies. Here's what I have picked up so far.
Number one, develop and implement a sustained national multimedia campaign to promote donation.
Two, increase the opportunities for donors to identify themselves as donors. At the federal level, we heard we could be using tax forms. Besides ServiceOntario, we could use Service Canada and various forms like that.
Three, promote enhanced interprovincial sharing of organs, particularly for people with more difficult and special circumstances.
Number four came out of what I heard today as much as from before. It sounds as though we have a national coordinating agency, but it may need to be more robust. It should be doing best practice identification, and maybe even implementation strategies. I am astonished, to be honest with you, at the variation across Canada by province. That tells me that provincial leadership is essential. When I look at the differences between Ontario and Nova Scotia versus Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador, there is a huge variation. That's where those best practices and strategies could be brought to bear, for sure. There's also a need for a national database for research, which I'm assuming could be operated by a national coordinating agency.
The last one—Laurie, you hit the nail on the head again—was what we heard from the Trillium Gift of Life witness at our last meeting. I used to run a hospital, and I know that in just the last two or three years, in around 2013-2014, the Gift of Life model changed. It stopped being left to a doctor or a nurse in the ICU or the emergency department to talk to the family. Those people are not geared to organ donation conversations; they're geared to life-saving strategies, so making that switch was almost impossible.
There's now a requirement in Ontario that you must report certain brain deaths to Trillium Gift of Life and pass the information on. Trillium Gift of Life then handles the conversation, and if it's acceptable to the family, an on-the-ground organ retrieval team comes out and works with the family and extracts the donated tissues.
When I look at the numbers in Ontario, that is the real boost that has happened—that really proactive approach by Trillium Gift of Life. I really want to push that need for support at the hospital in emergency and in the ICU by the provincial equivalents to Trillium across Canada, and the on-the-ground team that's ready to come out to the hospitals and assist the local caregivers.
That's my list.
Is there anything else you'd want to add to that, in terms of our coming up with recommendations?