CanChild was developed in 1989 as one of the Ontario government's health-system-linked research units. A small group of people were empowered to develop a five-year research plan in childhood disability, and we received infrastructure funding, which allowed us to hire and retain very skilled staff.
We still had to go out, and still do go out, to compete for research funds for specific studies, but this kind of platform, if you will, has allowed us to develop and maintain a very skilled group of people across a host of disciplines, across a number of centres in this country, in America, and in the Netherlands. Collaboratively, we're able to do things, including longitudinal studies, that simply are not possible to do when one has a two- or three-year grant and has to stop at that point.