Good morning.
I'm a clinician who runs a very large Parkinson's clinic here in Ottawa. I am also involved in clinical research as well as some basic science research. I've been looking after Parkinson's patients for close to 12 years.
It became very apparent to me that as Canadians we could do a lot better in both our basic research realm, clinical research, as well as in the clinical care of patients. Two years ago I was involved in organizing a meeting for really all the players in Canada to come together, both clinicians as well as basic scientists, to look at how we could do a better job at studying Parkinson's as well as caring for individuals with Parkinson's.
Quite a few things came out of that meeting. I had all the major Parkinson's centres from across Canada there. It became very clear that the specialized Parkinson's centres actually care for less than half of individuals with Parkinson's in Canada, that a lot of the centres cover patients from a wide geographic area--so we have patients actually travelling a long way to get to see us--and that we could do a much better job if we were better organized from a basic science and clinical research standpoint.
One of the big things that came out of the meeting was, from a patient care perspective, can we do a better job of helping other physicians? If we're supposed to be the specialists and we're not seeing everybody who has the condition, how can we help other physicians care for and look after these patients?
One of the ways to do that is to look at guidelines. So we looked at all the different guidelines from around the world. It became apparent that our Canadian health care system was different from other health care systems and that we did need to come up with our own set of guidelines. We actually have now just finished the first draft of these guidelines. It has been a big undertaking and we're hoping to have them published in the spring. We're really hoping that this will be a stepping stone to developing and having more physicians understand what the best treatment options are for our patients in Canada.
The other thing that came out of the meeting was that it's a really patchwork treatment for patients in these specialized clinics. Most of the clinics have nurses, and the funding for the nurses comes from many sources, sometimes from provincial governments, sometimes from hospitals themselves, and sometimes it's from us as clinicians paying the salaries of the nurses within the clinics.
A couple of the clinics have occupational therapists and physiotherapists--they are so important in trying to care for these individuals, who are among the most complicated to look after--and then it's actually very uncommon that we have social workers involved in our clinics. Parkinson's is a chronic condition that progresses slowly and it gets so frustrating when we see individuals with Parkinson's who come into our hospitals, our acute care hospitals, when we really could avoid that. Almost all the time I have at least one of my patients in an acute care hospital somewhere in the Ottawa Valley region when it would probably not be necessary if we had a social worker, something simple like that. We could avoid that from a health care cost standpoint.
It also became very clear studying Parkinson's that there are a lot of very exciting things that are happening in basic research and our ability to translate that into clinical treatments is rapidly increasing. There is a large number of compounds that are being developed that are getting close and are now coming into clinical trials.
As Canadians we could do a much better job, I think, of being a leader in that and trying to help pharmaceutical companies develop these treatments within the Canadian context. There are a lot of exciting things happening in Parkinson's. There's still a lot more, though, that we need to do.
Thank you.