Health committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair and members of the standing committee, it's a privilege to address you this afternoon. My name is Greg Oudman. I am the Executive Director of Health Initiative for Men, a community non-profit organization located in Vancouver that is both led by and run by g

Health committee  Health Initiative for Men operates five health centres throughout the Lower Mainland that provide HIV and STI testing. We've developed an integrated approach at our health centres where access to our mental health programming, which I've described as well, is available through th

Health committee  Actually, I'm going to see if Travis would speak to that because that's his area of expertise rather than mine.

Health committee  I can speak about it a little bit. You've heard mention both today and from the other presenters who have spoken to your committee about the specific, unique needs of LGBTQ-identified folks. I think those same unique needs also apply to the sphere of mental health. We have foun

Health committee  Yes, definitely. We use the term “gay”, but we use it in the broadest possible sense. We're engaging in a process organizationally where we're looking at that definition and looking at how we present ourselves. We talk about the GBT2Q group of individuals that we work with, and d

Health committee  No, I think we see that for gender and sexual minorities generally the presenting issues are typical. My colleagues prior to me spoke to the marginalization that people who identify as a gender or sexual minority identify with. We see those issues across the board in all the indi

Health committee  The points that Travis made earlier when he responded to the question around problematic substance use among gay men I think also speak to the whole issue of chemsex—or what's often referred to as “party and play” here in Canada more so than “chemsex”. For some of the same reason

Health committee  In terms of the number of men who are served by Health Initiative for Men, we operate five health centres. That's our biggest point of contact. We provide supports to about 10,000 men who identify as GBTQ2 in a year. That's within the health centre specifically. Then I've talked

Health committee  What does it cost? We have a budget of $1.6 million annually that's primarily funded via government sources. Our largest funder is the local health authority here in Vancouver, Vancouver Coastal Health. We receive money through the Public Health Agency of Canada's community acti

Health committee  I think a quick win would be to encourage the development of a national strategy, a national LGBTQ2S health strategy that streamlines approaches to LGBTQ2S health. It would look at what the drivers to compromised health are and then develop a streamlined, comprehensive approach r