Veterans Affairs Committee on May 29th, 2008

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Okay, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Is that all, Mr. Sweet?

Is there anybody else who wishes to pick up on the four minutes that Mr. Sweet has left?

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

May I just add one point, Mr. Chairman?

Ms. Graham, you talked a little earlier about how you're trying to provide long-term care, in other words, outside of the institutions. Could you expand on that for us just a little bit? That's part of what we call our VIP, veterans independence program, but we're trying to improve on it to see where the strengths and weaknesses are in it.

[Gail Graham]

Thank you.

We have an Office of Care Coordination Services, and it's really a combination of things, both home health and home telehealth, where we monitor the patients remotely so that if there's some vital sign that goes awry, the nurses monitoring those feeds will know right away.

Those are some of the programs. And we have a couple of pilots in residential programs, all trying to get away from the institutional, traditional nursing home care.

So there is a variety of things we're trying to do to keep the veterans in their homes.

We also have programs where we can support the family members to help in the care and treatment of the veteran, where we subsidize them for providing those services in addition to professional home health services that we would either provide directly or pay for.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I just have one final quick question. Are there opportunities where the veterans affairs departments of different countries actually get together and correspond and look at different programs and how they can integrate and do what we're doing?

[Keith Pedigo]

Yes, there is a program. In fact, there was a meeting of this group about three weeks ago. We call it the “ministerial forum”. The ministers from Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, and the VA Secretary, as well as staff from veterans affairs departments of those different countries, met for a two-day period here in Washington and we discussed how we run our veterans benefits and health care programs. We shared best practices with one another.

There will be another meeting of a subcommittee of that group in London in about two weeks, and we will be sending people, as will your country and the other three.

We have found this to be extremely beneficial, a good venue for sharing information and comparing perspectives on how we provide benefits and health care to our veterans.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

No, I apologize, I guess I knew that you did; I was just trying to get what you answered at the last, and that's how you actually feel about it and how successful it is in terms of information-sharing.

Again, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you.

Now we'll go to the Liberal Party of Canada, to Mr. Valley for five minutes.

[Roger Valley, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

Thank you.

I have just one question. I'm not sure how much of a comment I'm going to get.

Someone mentioned the difference in veterans nowadays, that our veterans are much more sophisticated, much more savvy in how they deal with issues. In fact, both our countries' veterans are having to deal with issues that former vets, especially when you go back to the World War I and II, never had to deal with. I guess from that we can draw that different wars, different conflicts, different theatres of operation are all going to have different approaches to veterans.

Is there much planning in the future? Here we seem to be trying to play catch-up all the time. I don't know how you can look forward to serving somebody when you don't know what the issues are going to be, but is there much looking to the future? Or do we deal with what we have to face and try to serve the needs that we have already?

I'm suggesting that here we play catch-up. Is it the same thing in the United States?

[Gail Graham]

We have a process that we call “veteran population”, where we look at where the projected growth is--for instance, among different age groups, or among men or women—so that we can plan services accordingly. For those, we look at areas that are expanding in growth.

For example, Florida has greatly expanded in the number of veterans who are living there part time and full time, so we've had to expand services there. It was one of the first places we used more home health and telemedicine, simply because of the expansions.

We're currently building three new hospitals. They are certainly different models from the hospitals that we have today, recognizing that the average age of our basic medical centre facilities is about 50. So we're certainly planning for rooms to be wired with Internet access, for both the patient and the providers, and for families to be present. We see in this generation that the wife may be there, but also the mother and the father and the siblings may be with that person the entire time too.

We have developed four acute polytrauma centres throughout the country, but we are also divided into 21 networks. They each have a secondary polytrauma centre to be able to deal with these things locally as well.

I think we have the same challenges and could learn from each other. In some things we're trying to play catch-up, such as in technology. Technology is really advancing at a rate that is very difficult to keep up with. So I think we have some similar challenges.

[Roger Valley, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you very much.

At this stage, ladies and gentlemen, we're getting close to the end of the allocated time.

I would like to thank our witnesses tremendously. I've learned a great deal today. You've given me some ideas for the committee to pursue in the future on maybe some interesting streams that I hadn't thought of before, other than, for example, electronic records and so on.

Thank you very much for the work you do. You've been great representatives of your country and your country's efforts on behalf of veterans. I'm humbled listening to some of the things you've talked about that you do for veterans in the United States. I hope to work with you in the future, as I'm sure other committee members do, to do these things.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you very much for your time.

Committee members, I think we have come to an exhaustion of business for today, unless anybody has something else to add.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

I move that we adjourn.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

All right, the meeting is adjourned.