Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. It is my pleasure to appear before you today with, via telephone, Darragh Mogan, director general of policy and research at Veterans Affairs, and Rachel Corneille Gravel, executive director of Ste. Anne's Hospital.
We are here today to provide an update on the future of the hospital.
A deck with background has been provided to you with further information on Ste. Anne's itself and on the history of previous transfers by Veterans Affairs Canada of veterans facilities. I'm not going to go through it in detail; it is provided for your information. I will have opening remarks and cover some of the content that is in the deck.
First of all I would like to give the committee an update on discussions regarding a potential transfer.
Last July the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Quebec government Health Department exchanged letters of interest as to discussions on a potential transfer. A first meeting was held at the end of September and led to preliminary discussions on the matter. A follow-up meeting was held mid-November and another will take place in January.
We are committed to keeping veterans, their families, and key stakeholders informed. We have established a link on our website to provide easy public access for up-to-date information. We have met and will continue to meet with national bargaining representatives and local unions.
The Government of Canada has a very long and proud history of providing facility-based health care and long-term care services and benefits to Canada's veterans. In the early 1960s the department had 18 hospitals. At that time the delivery of health care became a provincial responsibility and we saw the inauguration of universal hospital insurance.
Given these changes, the 1963 Glassco commission recommended to government that departmental hospitals be transferred to the provinces. VAC began transferring its facilities to the provinces in which they were located. The last such transfer was the Saskatoon Veterans Home in 1996.
Ste. Anne's Hospital is the last federal hospital to be administered by Veterans Affairs Canada. Its role as a leader in the field of care and support for military staff dates back to 1917 when it was founded by the Invalid Soldiers Commission, to care for wounded World War I veterans.
The building of Ste. Anne's Hospital was then part of a national initiative started in 1915 due to the lack of capacity in the provinces, because of improper infrastructure, to meet the needs of wounded soldiers upon their return from the front. The first buildings were built quickly and without any major investment, to meet the immediate need in beds. They were torn down in 1970 and replaced by a modern 13-storey building.
The hospital has a reputation for excellence in several clinical fields and is nationally known for its high quality of care and services offered in both official languages. It has developed a unique expertise that is perfectly adapted to the complex clinical needs of traditional veterans. For younger generations of veterans, the hospital provides mental health care and services accessible throughout the country thanks to a coordinated national network of operational stress injury clinics. The area of research is growing at Ste. Anne's, and a research affiliation with McGill University has recently been formalized.
We have made two attempts in the past decade to transfer Ste. Anne's. We are optimistic that it will work this time, because the province's need for long-term care aligns well with the availability of beds at Ste. Anne's. After the last attempt to transfer Ste. Anne's in 2001, the Government of Canada recognized the needs at Ste. Anne's and allocated $114 million over time to modernize the physical plant and infrastructure. The renovations at Ste. Anne's have been undertaken to eliminate all health and safety risks for residents and employees, to provide veterans with an environment adapted to their changing needs, and to bring the hospital in line with provincial standards. The modernization is mainly complete, and the facility is now able to house 446 residents, all with their own private room and adjoining bathroom.
In all previous transfers of VAC facilities the department has put in place guarantees to maintain priority access for veterans, to maintain the high quality of care for veterans, to retain the high quality of personnel, and to guarantee care in the official language of the patient's choice, where required. The care of veterans in these facilities has been integrated into the department's overall long-term care strategy. Veterans Affairs ensures these guarantees are met through monitoring to ensure that all facilities remain accredited through the national hospital accrediting process, ongoing monitoring at the facilities by VAC personnel, enforcement of the obligations set out in the negotiated agreements to transfer, and monitoring and analysis of provincial compliance monitoring data. In addition, to ensure the guarantees meet the needs of VAC clients, we measure client satisfaction through ongoing client surveys. Our most recent national survey showed client satisfaction rates of 97%.
I know the committee has expressed its intention in the past to visit Ste. Anne's. We would welcome such a visit. In addition, the committee may wish to consider visiting previously transferred facilities to see how such transfers have worked.
Admission of eligible veterans to Ste. Anne's has peaked and projections show it will decline steadily over the next ten years. The average age of clients admitted to Ste. Anne's is 87. The department's demographic projections show the supply of beds will begin to exceed veteran demand by 2010 and that by 2015-16 there will be more empty beds than resident veterans. Maintaining the quality of care and services at Ste. Anne's involves maintaining a critical mass of residents. To ensure the potential of the facility is maximized and that full advantage is taken of the government's investment in modernizing the hospital, its ability to use vacant beds is a key issue. Any discussions about the hospital's future have as their first priority to ensure that our veterans at Ste. Anne's continue to receive the quality care they have earned and deserve.
Transferring Ste. Anne's to the Province of Quebec would maintain and maximize the hospital's expertise in geriatrics and psycho-geriatrics and increase bed availability for other Canadians in need. Currently there are needs for long-term care beds in the provincial health region where Ste. Anne's is located. Any future transfer agreement would require that veterans continue to have priority access to quality of care and services, that the interests of hospital employees are protected, and that official languages guarantees are respected, as was the case in the government's previous successful transfers.
If a transfer agreement were to be signed, it would have to be approved by both orders of government before it could be implemented. To give you an idea of expected timelines, I would point out that previous transfers have taken between three and five years to be finalized. The Government of Canada has undertaken to duly inform the public, internally and externally, during the entire process.
Thank you very much.
