Thank you, honourable member.
I was born in Nigeria. I grew up there and I did my medical school, and then I moved to Ireland, where I trained as a psychiatrist before moving to England to train as a child psychiatrist. Then I moved to Canada, so I've had the opportunities to learn from different countries and different practices.
I must say that every country is unique in its approach with regard to mental health. One thing I noticed when I first came to Canada was that there was a different approach. It was more like specialists. We have different mental health professionals who would focus on an area of special interest. For example, mine is eating disorders. We have people for addictions and different areas, which is good.
In those other countries, specifically Ireland, I found that the approach was different. It had its own advantages when it came to this team approach and being multidisciplinary, with social workers and nurses who would know almost everybody in a community. They'd have a team assigned to one community. They would know when there was a family moving out and a new family moving in. It was easier to monitor.
We find that generally in Europe. You mentioned the Netherlands. That's where sometimes you see a lot of research. It's easier to monitor and do longitudinal studies—even for 10 years and even when people move to a different province—because there is a team of health care professionals who are quite close to them. They know them and the families are comfortable with their health care providers. They know almost everybody.
I don't know how practicable it is to incorporate some of this model, but I think it is definitely worth trying. There are a lot of advantages to using that approach.