Finance committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to outline the Canadian Nurses Association vision for a stronger, healthier, and wealthier Canada. My name is Marlene Smadu, and I'm the president of the Canadian Nurses Association, representing registered nurses from across the country.

Finance committee  The Canadian Nurses Association fully respects the jurisdictional authority over health and education, but in particular in the area of health, we do have the Canada Health Act, which is federal legislation that requires a federal role in terms of ensuring that the Canadian healt

Finance committee  No. We belong to the International Council of Nurses, which has a position statement against unethical recruitment of nurses from developing countries, so I would defer to my fellow witness. We're not there to go and poach nurses or rob nurses from other places. But we clearly do

Finance committee  No, it's a PhD.

Finance committee  Health human resources is a key priority for nursing, but we really believe information technology is an infrastructure issue on which we are probably ten years behind. We have some evidence already that when you have appropriate technology in place, your actual utilization of he

Finance committee  It could make the nurses more efficient or make better use of them as nurses. I think it will definitely add to the quality of care for citizens, because it creates a different level of safety and quality in the system. I think it becomes an attractive feature. I'm in education

Finance committee  The Canadian Nurses Association is very clear about the importance of investing upstream in terms of the health of Canadians, so we pay a lot of attention to the social determinants of health. Those include education, employability, housing, water, and all of those basic infrastr

Finance committee  The staff at the CNA is certainly studying the cuts in terms of what the impacts are. We recognize that there are sometimes programs that are not effective, and we're very open to the issue of ensuring that everything we do is evidence-based. But clearly, on the issue of literacy

Finance committee  I'm an optimist, and we're going to get there. I think it takes the tremendous will of all politicians, because it's very easy to respond to what hits the front page of the media, which tends to be acute care and institutional-based issues. We need to have a concerted effort. Ea

Finance committee  I think citizens in Canada feel their care is often disjointed right now, because the information about them is not where it needs to be when it's needed. They need to repeat. They have their history taken ten times, every time they go through the health system. The electronic he

Finance committee  You employ nurses through First Nations and Inuit Health Branch right across the country, the Department of National Defence, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I think those are main areas, but First Nations and Inuit Health Branch is where you have most of your nurses emplo

Finance committee  Currently they're required to be licensed in whatever jurisdiction they're practising, so even though they're employed by the federal government, those who work in Saskatchewan are licensed with the Saskatchewan Registered Nurses' Association.

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. They're running remote and rural stations, they're clinical nurse specialists. Yes, they're practising, often from those vulnerable circumstances.

Finance committee  I don't, but I had a very interesting conversation with a nurse who has been in Afghanistan. She practises in Calgary and will be going back to Afghanistan in May. She's in the reserves. Her comment was that they're badly in need of nurses to work in Afghanistan, so we've arrange

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm Marlene Smadu. I'm the president of the Canadian Nurses Association. We represent over 133,000 registered nurses throughout the country. Thank you for the opportunity to outline CNA's review of the progress of the 10-year plan to strengthen health ca