Good afternoon.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for inviting us to appear before you today. We appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about a Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs partnership, known as the operational stress injury social support program, better known as the OSISS program.
This program focuses on CF members, veterans, and families who are suffering and struggling with operational stress injury and who know full well the impact that has on them.
How a workplace or organization responds to individuals suffering from mental health conditions and their impacts is paramount in the recovery of the individual who is struggling.
Our vision in the operational stress injury social support program is quite simple. We focus on helping to get people into treatment as early as possible and providing the support they require to continue on that road to recovery. It is a peer support program.
Before we begin the opening remarks, I am going to introduce you to the team. With me is Major Mariane Le Beau. She is the program manager for DND. I am the program manager for Veterans Affairs. Laryssa Underhill is a peer support coordinator working with families and she is a Veterans Affairs employee. Cyndi Muise is a peer support coordinator and a DND employee working with both CF members and veterans with operational stress injury.
I'll not go over our presentation outline but I will go through some slides that will give you a bit of an overview of what our program is all about. There were many drivers to this program. SCONDVA, the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs, was a big one, so we'll go back to the 1999-2000 area. The Croatia Board of Inquiry was another big driver, as well as the DND ombudsman's report of 2001 on operational stress injuries.
This program was the vision of Lieutenant-Colonel Stéphane Grenier, who is still serving in the Canadian Forces. He is himself a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. He had a vision, and he is the founder of the program and has worked very hard and tirelessly to get this program up and running.
It's a partnership program. It was started at National Defence, and Veterans Affairs became a partner shortly thereafter. It was the subject of a joint ministerial announcement made by both the Minister of National Defence and the Minister of Veterans Affairs in October of 2002.
We used a phased-in approach to implementation. We started by providing peer support for CF members and veterans. We then moved on to do a needs analysis to see what the needs were of families struggling with operational stress injury and the impacts it was having on the families, and we implemented family support in 2005.
In 2006 we moved on to implement bereavement support because we were seeing a great number of families who were losing a loved one as a result of military service.