Health committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair. The Canadian Medical Association is pleased to address the committee as part of its ongoing study of H1N1 planning and response. In the broad context of pandemic planning, the CMA has focused on developing information and education to

Health committee  If I may, I think I articulated for you what the CMA believes are the three gaps. To address your specific question about surge capacity, I'm sorry but I don't have absolute numbers for you. I'm sure we can get them for you if you want them.

Health committee  What I would encourage you to think about is that over the last 10 to 15 years we have been driving towards using our facilities at greater than 95% capacity, particularly our in-patient facilities. There is no capacity. So if we're talking about surge capacity in the context of

Health committee  The short answer is that is the only method of primary prevention for influenza. This is a brand new strain of influenza. It is something that people under the age of 65 and their immune systems have not seen; they have not seen anything that closely enough resembles it to have

Health committee  Yes, there are meetings planned. There is a commitment to ongoing work, which I understand is proceeding quite quickly, to produce a very simple algorithmic pathway for people to look at to help them with clinical decision-making. And other tools will be made available. Our asso

Health committee  The answer is to tell Health Canada that you will give it the authority to roll something out without waiting for the multiple layers underneath. If there was a clear directive, and if the Public Health Agency had the authority to make a decision that would be acted on by everybo

Health committee  To give you an example, I will quote my colleague Dr. Shortt, who told me this afternoon that he was trying to find the clinical adult dosage for TAMIFLU and could not find that information anywhere in the published material now available. Actually, it was buried somewhere in the

Health committee  Based on the conversation last week with Dr. Butler-Jones, my understanding is that there will be the development of a tool such as the one I just described to you--we hope quickly.

Health committee  Madam Chair, if I may, I'd like to jump in on that as well. There is absolutely no question that the Canadian Medical Association has been saying very loudly that this promised money must be released to be used at the front line. A year from now--after it's been studied again an

Health committee  The cma.ca website has a page that is dedicated to H1N1. It not only has the information that the CMA itself has made available, but it has links to all of the provincial and territorial medical associations and through them to the agencies that they are linked to. There's local

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning, members of the committee. As the president of the Canadian Medical Association and a family physician from Saskatoon, I am pleased to address the finance committee during your pre-budget consultations. Canada's physicians believe that

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct. The concept of shovel-ready means that we have facilities or construction projects that are ready to go but not yet actualized. I'm not talking about things that are seven years out; I'm talking about things where we're literally ready to dig the hole in the

Finance committee  That's a question I wasn't expecting from this particular audience, but thank you for it. We've had only a brief chance to review the recommendations that Commissioner Dagnone has made. Having said that, I think there are strong synergies in many of the recommendations with the

Finance committee  Absolutely. The main benefit would be to individual physicians and those others who own facilities that are providing health care. It is not only physicians but anyone who is self-employed. In this province, well over 90% of physicians are not in fact supported in their infrastr

Finance committee  Yes.