Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for being here today. It's greatly appreciated.
I appreciate, particularly Dr. Haeck and Dr. Salami, your comments on dealing with mental health, in particular on the aspects of dealing with how it impacts sports and education and how important that is. It's something very important to me, recognizing that it was a great benefit to me many years ago when I was dealing with aspects along those lines. With that said, I hope I'll be able to ask questions on that.
My main first question, though, is.... Thanks to our analysts, we received some interesting information from CIHI, the Canadian Institute for Health Information. They point out that medical complexities make up about 1% of the pediatric population, and they're heavy users of the health care system at around basically 50% of our total hospital costs, which are quite significant numbers.
With COVID, it unfortunately appears that we're seeing a lack of education in public usage of emergency situations in bringing children to hospitals, which is tying up a lot of hospital areas such as emergency rooms with situations that might be able to be dealt with at home with better education systems and better understanding of the health care system. These are important things, so I guess my question is, how do we get that education to Canadians such that they understand it?
What we saw with COVID and we've seen over the last couple of years is basically uncertainty and misinformation that the public believes is coming from government. We as a federal government are trying to deal with something that is provincial in nature, but how do we as a federal government advance that education so that we can educate parents to understand how to deal with health issues for their children?
Ms. Bisaillon?