Actually, you know, it's very interesting, because you're putting your finger right on the tender spot.
We have a dual mandate at CIHR: to create knowledge, and to ensure that this knowledge, as I read earlier, is translated into better health outcomes and a better health care system. That's a huge challenge. It's a huge challenge for several reasons. I won't go through all of them, but we've identified that as a key and critical objective.
We're dealing in an area, however, which is right at the juncture of federal and provincial jurisdictions, because health care, as you know, is provincial jurisdiction and research is a mixed jurisdiction. So I'm convinced that the only way we're going to be able to very efficiently translate the results of the research is working more closely with the provinces to ensure that research is fully integrated in care, first of all.
Second, we've developed a patient-oriented research strategy at CIHR, which has one very clear, specific aim: to improve health outcomes through research. To do that, one of the things we want to do is create research networks that will be clinical research networks that will help us evaluate innovations, bring things more efficiently from the bench to the bedside, evaluate innovative treatments, and also evaluate current treatments and eliminate what we're doing that is useless or does more harm than good. It is less glamorous, but it's equally important to do that if we want to improve the impact of that great research we're doing in Canada on the quality of our health care system, and of course in the quality of health outcomes.
The same is particularly critical in the area of mental health, where we have excellent research, but yet not enough clinical research. We have fantastic people, but not enough, and they're not sufficiently networked across the country. That's what we want to do: we want to support the establishment of clinical research networks in mental health.