I've heard another question that I think is extremely important, and that is the one about the use of emergency rooms to address palliative care needs. I believe that within systems we can do a much better job further upstream of preventing those sort of visits by being proactive.
I worked for three years as the palliative care lead for Cancer Care Ontario. We found some evidence that if you address symptoms beforehand, manage them, and are proactive in having goals of care discussions and advanced care planning, you actually start to reduce the number of visits to emergency rooms. When you train paramedics, you start reducing them, so I think it's important that there be strategies upstream to prevent those visits.
With respect to the issue of comprehensive care, I also work as research director for the College of Family Physicians of Canada, and we're very proud that we are really promoting the concept, through the “patient medical home”, of comprehensiveness and continuity of care. You will see with time those concepts moving much more to the forefront and becoming integrated as well in the training of family medicine residents. Comprehensive care will become integrated as well in what's expected of family physicians, so I think those sorts of programs need boosting and need encouragement, and it's not just the family physicians: it is all other physicians as well—oncologists, cardiologists, etc., who, with some basic training, can actually be part of the solution.