Mr. Chair, esteemed members of the committee, Professor Sareen, I'm speaking to you from the Royal and just using the opportunity to acknowledge that we are very privileged to contribute to work on this important topic here at the Royal. The Royal, as you may know, is an academic health science centre and it has been contributing to the leading edge of research on a variety of topics, amongst them depression and suicide.
The Royal has some experience in work with first responder services. For example, we have provided extensive mental health training to nurses within the correctional services. I work at the operational stress injury clinic here at the Royal, and at some other clinical programs at the Royal. I am a psychiatrist and clinical director of the OSI clinic. I have a few notes about the OSI clinics, which Professor Sareen also mentioned in his introduction, which, by the way, was an excellent overview.
The Royal has operated the OSI clinic since 2008, so this is part of the network funded by Veterans Affairs. We provide specialist care and support to the members, and mostly veterans, of the Canadian Armed Forces and also to the current and past members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who are experiencing mental health problems, as well as their respective families. I will speak to my experience as a clinician providing services to this particular population. To the issues of public safety officers and first responders we can easily apply some of our experience to that population as well, although, as it was mentioned before, particular aspects of their mental health issues, operational work stress problems, definitely need a further, more detailed survey and study.
We have some experience with paramedic services. Our department of psychiatry has been engaging in a round table around the issues that paramedic services, first responders, are struggling with, and they, in their grassroots-level initiative, have been collecting some data on the impact, on the consequences, on the services required, and this type of work needs to be done in a more coordinated and integrated way.
As was mentioned before, operational stress injuries in public safety officers and first responder types of workers, may be in some ways similar to those experienced by federal police and armed forces personnel and veterans, but there are certain specifics and certain cultures and subcultures that need specific attention. For example, the issues that corrections workers deal with in their day-to-day life and those of paramedics overlap somewhat, but also have many specific differences. This may lead to a certain fragmentation of the system of care and approach. We, on the site, have been witnessing certain developments that may lead to a variety of approaches, a lack of coordination, and the resources, as a result, are not used properly and not accessed in a way that leads to impact.
One obvious aspect, especially from our work with the federal police, which is really important to emphasize, is the importance of promoting a positive culture and perception around the work-related stress and operational stress injuries. To give some examples, Professor Sareen mentioned work done by the Department of National Defence. We found that for one of the programs, which is named road to mental readiness, R2MR, this approach has been adopted now as far as we know by the RCMP as well. The process of training and implementation has been done in various units and this program takes into account the continuum of mental health difficulties in operational work and also provides certain ways to access help and also how to help themselves.
This type of program may be easily adopted by the first responder services, and as was mentioned before, the models of care and expertise of the existing hubs of research and care should perhaps be taken into account, and correspondingly, a data-driven integrated strategy would be very helpful to have with all the input of stakeholders on national and provincial levels.
Perhaps I will stop now.
I will be happy to answer any questions and comments. Thank you very much for your attention. It's definitely a privilege to contribute to this important work.