Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
As we mentioned, the Official Languages Health Contribution Program is made up of three components: health networking, training and retention of health professionals, and health projects for communities.
The first component of the program supports health networks, through the Société Santé en français for francophones outside Quebec, and through the Community Health and Social Services Network for Quebec's English-speaking communities.
These networks engage health care stakeholders to enable improvements to health care services access in the minority official language. These stakeholders include provincial and territorial government representatives, health care administrators and health care professionals. The work of the networks is meant to leverage the introduction of new services in the communities they serve.
An example of this is the creation of the Saint-Thomas health centre, which is the first francophone community health centre in Alberta. Another example is the establishment of a bilingual health services centre in Halifax's regional municipality.
In Quebec, the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages has highlighted the work of the Community Health and Social Services Network. This network has signed an implementation framework with the Quebec Health and Social Services System in order to improve access to health and social services for Quebec's English-speaking communities.
The second component, training and retention of health professionals, is piloted by the Consortium national de formation en santé and its member institutions outside of Quebec and by McGill University in Quebec. The consortium's members--that is, the francophone universities and colleges outside Quebec--receive funding from Health Canada to increase the number of positions available in their training programs in areas of health. Since 2008, 1,530 graduates of these training programs have joined the pool of health care workers available to provide services in various regions of Canada in the minority official language.
According to a study carried out with the 2008-2009 batch of graduates, not less than 86% of them are now practising a health-care profession in official language minority communities, be it as nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, speech-language pathologists, and so on.
Thanks to the family medicine training program at the Centre de formation médicale du Nouveau-Brunswick, which is funded in part by Health Canada, the first batch of 14 students obtained their degrees in 2010. Before that, francophone medical students had to go to the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec to complete their schooling.
In Quebec an entirely different approach was adopted to ensure that the English-speaking communities have access to health care services in English regardless of the region they live in. As the Standing Committee on Official Languages recently reminded us, the availability of English-language health care services varies greatly, depending on whether you are in the Montreal region or the Côte-Nord region.
To ensure that a large number of health care professionals are able to provide health care in English, particularly in regions where access is restricted, McGill University offers language training to health professionals who are already members of the workforce. From 2008 to 2011, McGill trained 3,766 health care professionals through its language-training project.
Lastly, the third component of the program, health projects for official language minority communities is intended to favour the integration of services and improve access to care in minority languages. In Quebec these projects are essentially aimed at promoting health or adopting existing services.
Outside Quebec there are projects aimed at improving access to services for the elderly, children and youth, as well as health promotion projects. In total, 151 projects have received funding from Health Canada under the roadmap. An example of these projects is the creation in Vancouver of a multidisciplinary mental health team that provides support for disadvantaged francophones suffering from addiction.
Société Santé en français has also partly funded a health promotion and disease prevention project in the Ottawa area for French-speaking newcomers to Canada.
In the fall of 2011, an evaluation was launched to examine the program's suitability and performance in accordance with the Government of Canada's evaluation policy. Data is currently being collected so that the final report can be completed, as scheduled, for the summer of 2012.
I will now give the floor to Ms. Beresford-Green.