Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable committee members. I'm honoured to have the privilege and opportunity to present to you on antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. I come to you as director of the Sinai Health System-University Health Network antimicrobial stewardship program. Sina

Health committee  Your question is a good one, but I'll point out that the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators, and the Toronto Maple Leafs have more analytics in their organizations and more reliable data than we have in our whole country on AMR. If we can figure out how much puck time each p

Health committee  That's very true. You are exactly correct. It needs to be coordinated. There is so little money available for this topic. I pointed out to you how it is a fraction of what some other areas of health care are afforded, and there's no coordination. We need national coordination th

Health committee  You were addressing that to Dr. Keynan.

Health committee  I can start. Our commitments are similar to what was outlined in the pan-Canadian framework, so we have responsibilities for surveillance, and we have responsibilities for antimicrobial stewardship and infection prevention and control. We equally have responsibilities to develop

Health committee  Absolutely. That conventional wisdom is born out of misunderstanding, even of statements originally made by Alexander Fleming when he received his Nobel Prize, and from experiences with management of tuberculosis. They are not grounded in fact. Treating longer for most infections

Health committee  I think it's important that we have a system in place to allow that to happen. We need a centralized database, a centralized repository of the information. We need to make it readily understandable, so it has to be easy to digest. Things like infographics are very helpful. Much l

Health committee  I would just add that I totally agree with everything that was said. I think one of the dangers of having it just centrally, though, without having a true network—to disclose, I'm at the moment working on developing a network across the country to do this very thing—is that you l

Health committee  Is there a potential benefit? I think the answer most people would say is “yes”. I think all of us have already alluded to the fact, though, that we don't have enough investment in the basic elements of public health infrastructure, the things that will prevent infections—hand hy

Health committee  I will let our IPAC Canada colleagues answer.

Health committee  First of all, it's not a feasible thing to have a universal protocol because bacteria and their resistance differ internationally. There's certainly a hope that eventually we'll have an acceptable standard policy for what settings they can be used in so that they should only be u

Health committee  I'll start that at least. Education is really important, but we know in health care that education alone doesn't work. In terms of what we refer to as implementation science, it is probably one of the weakest interventions we can have. We need governance and policy. We need bes

Health committee  A hundred million dollars.

Health committee  If I could just add.... There was a comment about whether I'm serious. I'm dead serious. We use well over a billion dollars of antimicrobials. We spend billions of dollars isolating patients and doing things to prevent spread. With $100 million, we'll reap that reward in spades.

Health committee  That's a great question. There are several aspects to the Naylor report. Certainly science that is directed for the sake of science is really important. A key emphasis of the Naylor report is that we need to go back and just embrace science, and have investigator-initiated scie