Thank you.
I should say the most important part of my bio, and why I sit before you, is that I am a veteran. I did serve in the Canadian Navy for 14 years. I'm very proud of that, and it is part of the reason I'm very passionate about what we do at the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research.
You've each been handed a folder that has our information brochure in it. It also has my business card and information about our third annual military and veteran health research forum. You all will have received invitations to our VIP event on November 26. It would be a great fact-finding mission for this committee to see all of the information that will be presented at the forum, so if any of you are interested in attending, please let me know.
Here is a little bit about the institute. Our vision is that the health and well-being of Canadian military personnel, veterans, and their families are maximized through world class research, resulting in evidence-informed practices and policies. We believe it's our mission to optimize the health and well-being of Canadian military personnel, veterans, and their families by harnessing and mobilizing the national capacity for high-impact research, knowledge creation, and knowledge exchange.
What we mean by that is we want to work at the clinical end of the research spectrum—on things that are going to affect practices and policies that will help the health of military personnel, veterans, and their families in the very short term.
Why is this necessary? Well, as I'm sure you know, there are more than 700,000 veterans in Canada, of whom only 11% are clients of Veterans Affairs. So the rest are out there in the wind and at the mercy of our provincial health care systems and not being tracked. We also have about 100,000 members of the military, which would include the reserve and the regular force.
Until the time we started the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, we were alone among our major military allies in not having an institute like this. Being Canadian, not only did we decide we needed to come on board, but we also decided we needed to do it in a really unique way. I'll explain a little of that to you.
We work very closely with our government partners in National Defence and Veterans Affairs, but what we're able to do is augment. By harnessing the national research capacity of researchers around Canada, we can augment the existing capacity that National Defence and Veterans Affairs have to do research. But we can also provide arm's-length...we have an arm's-length capacity for research.
I don't need to tell you that if the government does the science, regardless of the rigour, if the results are not what the public wants to hear, the government is criticized for it. Once it's in the independent academic world, that makes a difference.
I released from the military in 1998, and I don't believe this could have been started at that time, but with Afghanistan, the public interest was extraordinarily high, and I must say that the academic interest was also extraordinarily high in starting an institute like this.
What are we? If you pull out your little information sheets, you'll see that we're a network of 25 Canadian universities that are dedicated to researching the needs of Canadian military personnel, veterans, and their families. For any of you who have ever even come close to the academic world, you'll know that to get two universities to agree to something is kind of a miracle, so for 25 to come on board I think speaks to the importance and the interest in this topic.
We do serve as a conduit between the academic community, so the hub of CIMVHR is at Queen's and the Royal Military College. But where we really exist is across the country in the labs where all the research is being done and in the labs in the clinics where all the research is being done. We work most closely with National Defence, particularly the Canadian Forces Health Services group, and Veterans Affairs.
We've also been able to connect really nicely with our international organizations, the similar ones. We work very closely with King's Centre for Military Health in England, the Australian Centre for Military and Veteran Health, and many centres throughout the U.S. through the Department of Defence and VA. They don't have just one institute in the U.S.; they have many. As an institute, we believe that our outcomes are research, education, and knowledge exchange.
Education is critically important, because you can't build a research institute unless you build your next generation of researchers. We have started a graduate course, a webinar-based graduate course jointly offered by Queen's and the Royal Military College, on military and veteran health. We have 21 graduate students participating from across the country. This is our first year. We're pretty excited by that.
We also work at the knowledge exchange end of the spectrum, so we're getting the information into the hands of the clinicians who work with these people as well as the policy-makers who work with these people. What people want...everybody talks about evidence-based medicine, but we have such a captive population in Canada, especially with National Defence, and we really are able to get the best information into the hands of the clinicians who are working with soldiers, sailors, and airmen and -women.
We have been working on building partnerships and support, with meetings like this—and I'm very honoured to be here today, so I thank you for inviting me—to get to be known in the government. We have had very vocal support from the Minister of Veterans Affairs, who speaks of us often in public.
The other way that we are trying to make a difference is by linking with the national professional associations. Some of our big supporters are the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Physiotherapy Association, and the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists. So we have access to the clinical community as well, which, as I told you, is important to us from our knowledge exchange perspective.
We work with a lot of university-linked research institutes, such as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Glenrose in Alberta. A lot of the clinical-based research institutes are part of us as well. Also, the Royal Canadian Legion is a big supporter. Just to show you that we take the definition of health in a very broad spectrum...the World Health Organization definition of a complete state of mental, physical, and social well-being. We were admitted to the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities earlier this year as well.
As for our researchers, while the majority are from the health sciences, we also have people from engineering, kinesiology, English, drama, and history, which are all different departments that are working on mental health and social health needs. In very diverse areas, people are making links that they didn't used to make.
In terms of funding and sustainability, the short answer is that we're not. We have some seed funding from Queen's for my position. I've been bought out of my teaching; I'm a professor there but have been bought out of my teaching to do this. We have been applying through the regular granting institutes, but what's happened is that a lot of researchers have come to the table with resources. They have grants for studies and what they really want is access to the populations.
For long-term sustainability, we are looking at philanthropy and industry partnerships, because the public-private partnership is the only way to go, I think, but we also have been getting universities to try to establish research chairs at their universities. Once a chair is at a university and is dedicated to military and veteran health, it stays there in perpetuity, so that ensures that this carries on. So far, there are three chairs across the country and two that are related to CIMVHR, our institute.
In terms of applicability as well, I think what is really important to notice is that while we are focused on military and veteran health, there's the applicability to other first responders such as police and firefighters—and our link through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which works with people in high-stress occupations is evidence of that—but there's also applicability to the entire Canadian population. I think most of you recognize that.
Nobody likes war, but from war have come most of our medical advances. We can learn a lot in times of war. Just having come out of a period of conflict...in fact, probably the last 20 years in Canada have seen a pace of operations that is really unknown since Korea. In the medical world, we have seen that the advances coming out of peacekeeping and conflict are remarkable. Those are translating down into the civilian world.
I'll give you a tiny example of that. One of our chairs, Colonel Doctor Homer Tien, is the chief of trauma medicine at Sunnybrook. He's a military colonel embedded into the civilian health care force in order to keep him current in trauma medicine, because typically in the military you don't see it every day. At Sunnybrook Hospital, he was the one who took charge of the Scarborough shootings. He was in the papers for using the best practices that he had learned in Afghanistan in order to manage a shooting in Scarborough.
Those are just some of the things as a bit of background. I would welcome your questions.
