Thank you.
As Dr. Butler-Jones indicated, the agency inherited a number of individually managed surveillance systems, systems that were managed at a programmatic level.
What the surveillance strategy is doing is putting them together so that the agency manages all of our surveillance approaches in the organization as an agency. Currently, we're monitoring well over 50 diseases, which for the most part have been individually based. Putting it together and giving it a strategic direction, with goals to be the best data source and the best surveillance system in the world, allows us to think of it from an organizational perspective.
The role of the senior surveillance adviser is unique in the agency, in that all the surveillance has direct access to the CPHO on a daily basis to ensure that it's moving in the right direction. It allows us to apply evaluation to all the systems simultaneously. It allows us to look at standards, simultaneously for all our systems rather than as a series of one-offs. It allows us to interact with all the provincial and territorial partners as an organization, rather than in one-offs. It allows us to do our information sharing agreements jointly for all of the surveillance systems at the same time. It really is giving a common organizational perspective to what in the past, when we had individual programs, were functioning relatively independently, and which the agency inherited.