Veterans Affairs committee  I will make a comment first. You're absolutely right. I think that is a hugely important issue, and it relates a bit to the point that was raised a bit earlier about being part of the workforce. I guess that's what we were trying to get at in the presentation. It's not so much the question of working.

Veterans Affairs committee  Age-friendly communities is something that in fact was built on to the age-friendly cities initiative that we did internationally. Drawing from the experience of that, this was something that was applied to the Canadian context and it was done through the federal-provincial-territorial forum focused on seniors issues.

Veterans Affairs committee  It is about looking for common indicators of an age-friendly community, some practical advice in terms of what makes an age-friendly community, and a way of advocating for certain changes and improvements to be made in a community's core characteristics to encourage it to be age-friendly.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a very interesting question. I think that leads to the challenging issue of evaluation in the area of health promotion. We are definitely working very hard in that area. We put a number of resources into it. I think methodologies related to evaluation continue to evolve. Some are challenging in the sense that we need longitudinal studies to track the impact that we're having.

Veterans Affairs committee  I would say it's more the latter. We are working very hard to encourage people to undertake healthy activities in a number of ways, as I've expressed, in a number of different levels. The area of health promotion is extremely broad. It does deal with individual behaviours, but it also deals in a broader sense in policies that governments take that can have an impact on health.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll ask John to speak to that, if you don't mind.

Veterans Affairs committee  I must say your mother is very lucky. Health care is a provincial jurisdiction, and we don't interfere in it directly. Perhaps Nancy can talk about some of our initiatives. As I mentioned in my presentation, we're mainly concerned with knowledge development. We're trying to share our knowledge.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, and it's trying to work, as I mentioned, on the environmental conditions that people live in so that they can avoid crises later on. The preventive agenda is core to the work we do in the public health area. So it's exactly along those lines.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, it's in February; in fact, next week.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for that opportunity. Yes, in fact, we are very highly regarded in the world for the work we've done. The work related to age-friendly cities is something on which we've worked very closely with the World Health Organization. It's been really pioneering work. Through it, we've developed a guide that is being used around the world.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, but I think it goes beyond that as well. I think it's education. I think it's knowledge about best practices: what sorts of interventions have been tried that have proven to be successful; learning from the experiences of other countries and jurisdictions; looking for partnerships to try to transmit that information at the community level; looking for ways of playing a catalyzing role, so that specific interventions can be conducted at the community level.

Veterans Affairs committee  I just want to mention briefly that I agree with your point entirely. In fact, we are engaged in what we call a joint consortium on school health, dealing with the whole range of health behaviours in schools, including the issue of physical activity. Of course, from a federal government perspective, we don't have responsibility for what goes on in the schools, but we certainly participate in that forum, and use it as an opportunity to provide some information and some of the research results we have, and just try to play a helpful role in trying to encourage that sort of thinking, so we can make some connections.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thanks for the opportunity. There are some common risk factors that apply to a full range of chronic diseases, most of which have been mentioned here. They relate to physical activity, healthy eating, and smoking cessation, and of course healthy weight, which is related very often to physical activity and healthy eating.

Veterans Affairs committee  In terms of first nations, we involve the first nations and Inuit health part of Health Canada. They're very involved in these issues. You mentioned diabetes. There's an aboriginal diabetes strategy that focuses on the needs of that population. It's their role to focus specifically on that population, whereas the work we do is more geared toward the population of Canada as a whole.

Veterans Affairs committee  I could ask Ms. Milroy-Swainson to talk about medical and professional staff.