The final part of my discussion listed what we need to do. If it's okay with you, I'm going to read my points. I have seven bullet points that I think we need to do.
We need to improve early identification of young people with eating disorders. That means comprehensive education and training of health professionals.
We need more effective treatment modalities. As I said, we have some and they're okay, but that's not good enough. That's where the clinicians and the researchers need to work together to find those modalities.
We need to make sure evidence-based treatment programs are available in every province so individuals will have equal and immediate—immediate—access to these programs. The spectrum of treatment settings that need to be available in Canada and to Canadian citizens include in-patient facilities, out-patient programs, treatment programs, and residential programs. Right now in Ontario we do not have a residential treatment program and kids who need that need to go south of the border. We, our health care system, is paying for that, when we have fantastic and skilled clinicians here in Ontario who could easily treat these kids in the right setting.
We need to ensure immediate access to programming because there's very good evidence to show that early diagnosis and aggressive evidence-based treatments do make a difference in their recovery.
We need to increase awareness of these disorders to the general population, as we just said, especially for those who work with children and young women.
We also need to work on prevention. We need effective eating disorder prevention, and that starts with all of us. We need to address prevention at multiple levels to ensure consistent messaging, and we need to collaborate with and across sectors of health, education, and sport.
Finally, we need to conduct state-of-the-art research and provide excellence in clinical care. We need a research agenda and we need research funds. If you go to any international meeting, Canada has the people there who are doing the research, but we just can't find the funds. There are really skilled people here right across the country, especially working with children and adolescents and young adults.