We believe that having as much detailed data available as possible is critical to understanding, planning and managing health services. We've worked for quite a long time with affected communities to develop what we call our equity standards. Those talk about income, sex, gender—a number of things—and they include race and indigenous status. They are important to really understand the situation and to plan services.
One thing we've learned through this is that while collecting the data is important, it's also very important that the communities that generate the data or are the subject of the data are comfortable with collaborating in the data collection. In many cases there are racialized groups in particular who believe that data collection has been used for purposes that have created difficulties for them. We believe that attitude is changing and that the benefit of data is clear. Our role is to provide the standards so that it's collected in comparable and clear ways and can be aggregated for good use.