Oh, thank you.
What we want to do is to have a system where you....
We know that all provinces have to rely on accreditation of their organizations. Therefore, you can put in place standards and measures of the quality of palliative care. You can also enact symptom screening and distress screening in all chronic disease clinics.
I believe that doctors have great intentions, but they often aren't focused on symptoms; they're focused on disease indices and testing and so on. We need to hear from people. People will often rate very differently on a survey than what they will admit to their family doctors. We need to pick up suffering early. We need to have a system in place that ensures we are detecting it and addressing it early, before people are suffering to the point where they say, “My life is intolerable the way it is right now.”
It's my hope, knowing that this is within the control of the federal government, that in your role in reviewing the state of palliative care, you will take this incredible step to enforce a change in our system that will benefit everybody, no matter whether they have MAID or they have a natural death. I think it's very important.
I thank you.