Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for coming.
Lieutenant-General Beare, you talked about the homeless. I'm a recovering ER physician. I did that for 17 years before going into politics. My job was in the inner city of Winnipeg.
Many of our patients were homeless, and that was where most of them got all of their medical care. We were the family doctors for a large number of homeless people. We were not officially their family doctors, but it was the only care they got. We were aware of all the issues that bring about homelessness, with 60% of them being rooted in mental health.
We had a lot of interplay with the agencies. There's the Salvation Army, and one in Winnipeg called the Main Street Project. We said that without those things, we would have had to have triple-level bunk beds in our department.
There was one thing that never came up in my experience, because we hadn't really been trained for it, and there was no infrastructure or knowledge base to direct us this way as physicians. We had had no training to recognize whether any of these people were veterans or involved with the military. Again, because they got all their care there, that would be somewhere in their charts in the hospital.
Has there been any outreach to the medical system for training at the medical school level, and to putting this issue on the radar of emergency departments? All of the homeless eventually end up there. It can often be a good entry point. We use the emergency department to enter people into all sorts of programs, whether it's for substance abuse or psychiatric care. If we could get these people immediately on the radar of Veterans Affairs and all the groups that veterans can help, it might be able to help.
I think of the vast untapped resources. Has there been any consideration or any move to adding the primary medical system into this?