Yes, I'd be happy to.
Just to give you a bit of background, before I came to CCSD, I actually was the senior vice-president at the Ottawa Hospital, one of the largest academic health science centres in the country. So I often call myself a “recovering hospital administrator”, and still in recovery.
But I would say, from the perspective of the social determinants of health, the information in the mandatory long form is really, again, as I mentioned, kind of a navigation tool. It focuses on those aspects that determine our health, such as income levels, whether you are a single parent, whether you have supports such as child care so that you can get to work. All those things are taken into consideration, because we all know that all of them determine our path through the health care system.
It also helps us project out forward. We all know that we have this aging population in Canada. It's not enough just to know that we have an aging population; we also have to understand where to find them. Where do we need to focus our resources? Are they in urban areas? Are they moving back to rural areas? The long form helps us do that. It's a fundamental tool for that work.