Thank you very much to all three of you for your excellent testimony and for presenting your recommendations and thoughts to us.
I just want to step back a bit and review where we're at. Certainly the government and this committee are highly concerned about the number of overdoses and deaths, particularly from opioids. We've heard from many witnesses that this is a public health crisis, not a criminal justice issue. I've heard you echo that.
The Minister of Health has laid out a comprehensive federal strategy: better information for Canadians about the risk of opioids; supporting better prescribing practices; reducing easy access to unnecessary opioids; supporting better treatment options for patients and a better evidence base around this; allowing naloxone to be used, and bringing naloxone nasal spray in from the U.S.; and making some of the drugs that are used to produce fentanyl, some of the chemicals, illegal.
There will be a summit in November to deal with the opioid crisis, which I think the Minister of Health is convening. We're trying to figure out what recommendations we could add to that discussion from witnesses such as you.
From Dr. Wood I heard pretty clearly about training primary health care providers in addiction care and treatment strategies, establishing guidelines and practice standards so that there's a methodology to it, directed funding to addictions versus mental health and addictions, and the online prescription database.
I'm trying to figure out, Dr. Ujjainwalla, what the advice is; I heard about the gap. Is it that we don't have a proper diagnostic category for this? For the person who was left at the emergency department, there was no diagnosis. Do we need a DRG group—