It is really true that each province and territory addresses health care differently. Mental health affects us all, but we do have unique community needs. This is what we're seeing.
At the very basic level, we understand that COVID, which is a health care issue, has impacted different communities differently in disease with completely different impacts and outcomes. What we're learning from the research on COVID is that we have to translate that into local neighbourhood-based research. We can pull data from our hospitals around, and we do, and share that information, but what does it mean to have population-based research?
There are many components of that, and there are some great leading practices coming out of, for example, the Slaight Family Centre for Youth in Transition at CAMH, where they are looking at youth-specific research. One of the things they are sharing in co-design and co-participatory research is how COVID is impacting youth differently. Not all cohorts of youth are the same. Some might be thriving at home, and, as my colleague, Mr. Mitchell, said, some are not, and how do we understand and address that so we can be designing and delivering services that are effective so that we can take a health equity approach.
In community-based research what we want to have is the lens of health equity across that research, and then to be able to co-design and deliver services that are effective for those communities.
The research must be embedded in community, it must be co-designed, it must take into account a population ethnocultural lens so we can have a health equity approach, as well as addressing other cultural-specific groups like my colleague, Mr. Leslie, said: those with developmental disabilities, the 2SLGTBQ, and our indigenous communities and our Black communities.
All those communities have their own needs, so as we design and break down research, we need to not just stay at a global level, but to really take the investment to dig a little bit deeper because we know that responses must be designed to meet specific needs. The pandemic has shown us this. If we do not take in the specific populations, they get left behind, and without that health equity lens, they are disproportionately impacted.
We can do better, and that's what I would like to see us do.
Thank you again for your question. I hope I responded.