Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for coming. Thanks in absentia to Mr. Lévesque. I appreciated all the comments very much.
Dr. Ujjainwalla, I practised emergency medicine for almost 20 years in Winnipeg, much of it at the major teaching hospital downtown. I could not agree with you more that during training we did not receive nearly enough training in addiction. The only addiction training I received in medical school was a two-hour instruction on what to do if one of your own colleagues was addicted. I knew what number to call if I found out one of my colleagues was addicted to drugs. That was pretty much all I learned about it in medical school. I learned more in residency, because I did a five-year emergency residency. Most of what I learned about treating addiction was due to the fortunate coincidence that some of our physicians were part-time emergency physicians and part-time addiction specialists. I learned most of my addiction medicine from them during shifts, just during conversations, which is not a well-structured way to learn a very important topic.
I agree that we don't have the proper facilities we need. Family doctors don't know what to do. They send them to us. People come to the hospital expecting to be admitted for their morphine or fentanyl addiction. We tell them that we have no place to admit them. We don't have a program to admit them. Internal medicine won't admit them. We can't keep them in our emergency department. We can give them a prescription for clonidine and give them a referral, which is going to take weeks to months. That's all we have.
I initially disagreed, Dr. Ujjainwalla, with what you had said about harm reduction, but maybe I misunderstood. I think we would both come to the agreement that it's not the only pillar of treatment. If you had nothing but safe consumption sites for drugs, then you're not addressing the problem. I think you and I would both agree with that. But we talked about it being a band-aid solution. As I said in an earlier meeting, when I'm in the emergency department and someone is bleeding, they need the band-aid. When someone comes in stabbed, yes, they shouldn't have been stabbed, and that should have been prevented, but they're stabbed and they're bleeding.
Would you not agree there's a role for it in saving lives, improving outcomes, but in addition more investment in addiction is needed?