Thank you for putting me in this part of the order, because you're making my job far easier. Many of the things that were on my list have been discussed, so I can just go through some of them to reiterate my feelings on them.
We talked about universal pharmacare. I agree. I spent 20 years of my career as an emergency physician, and I saw people come in sick because they couldn't afford their medication. It's a regular occurrence. If you consider a plan that will make sure that everyone can get their medication, people might say that it's awfully expensive, but it's much more expensive not to. If you look at the cost of one patient who has to come to the emergency department for diabetic ketoacidosis and who ends up in the intensive care unit, you could have probably paid for a lifetime of that patient's insulin for the cost of that one visit.
That's just one example, but I think it's a very, very important example. We might be able to show that there's a net financial benefit in the long run in addition to it being the right thing to do.
Also, with regard to the interplay of seniors care, home care, and homelessness, I agree. It was said by a couple of people that hospitals are often bed-blocked by seniors who don't have any acute medical problem but who cannot go home. They have mobility issues, they become demented, and they don't need to be in a hospital, but there aren't proper home care supports or personal care home beds for them.
It's become so critical that sometimes people like this are brought into the emergency department by concerned family members, and internal medicine departments won't admit them because there's nothing medically wrong with them. In some appalling situations, we've seen patients stuck in our emergency department for in excess of a month. Again, you'll save substantial amounts of money by making sure that seniors have adequate housing and adequate home care.
This plays into homelessness as well. There are people who are homeless who are not seniors, and they are very expensive to the health care system. Given the large numbers, hospital admissions for frostbite and hypothermia in Winnipeg among the homeless, as you can imagine, are very, very costly. Again, dealing with homelessness would take a big burden off the health care system and probably ultimately save money.
As for other issues, I agree on the organ donation strategy.
Antimicrobial resistance is something for which I think there might be a bit of interplay between departments. I know we have a very long list, but something that has come to my attention, which might be worth looking into if we have the time, is re-emerging antibiotic resistance. We're dealing with this in the medical community and we're trying to educate health care providers on their prescribing practices.
Another significant source of antibiotic resistance is the agricultural community, which uses antibiotics in animal feed. For people who aren't familiar with this practice, when you feed antibiotics to healthy animals, they tend to grow faster, so basically you get a more profitable cattle operation. Somehow, and I don't quite know the mechanism, members of the ranching community are able to obtain antibiotics without a prescription from a veterinarian in response to an illness, and they are able to routinely feed them to their cattle. That practice looks as though it may be a significant source of antibiotic resistance, and it's a practice that I would certainly like to see banned. It's banned in many countries in the world, and I think banning it would help to ameliorate an evolving public health crisis.
There are other things on this list that I wanted to speak to. I agree that we need to take a closer look at supervised injection sites and at harm reduction in general. There is some science supporting it, but I think we need to look at all aspects of it, including the science behind it, the social issues behind it, and the justice issues behind it. I think it's a very important thing. There's tremendous potential to improve health outcomes by properly looking at this issue.
That's all I have so far.