Health committee  Of our business in our emergency departments, 90% is for non-urgent care. They are visits that could be deferred. It could be a prescription renewal. It could be having access to a nurse to have stitches removed. By having our CHCs in the community and working closely with the hospitals, we can divert a number of non-urgent cases.

Health committee  Yes. Ontario was actually the last jurisdiction to go this route. We have what we call a made-in-Ontario solution that is quite unique, where we maintain the local provider boards for local governance and direction in their community and the devolution of authority. We do not include public health.

Health committee  Perhaps I could help here. We've launched 150 family health teams in Ontario, and 50 new teams have been approved. So we keep adding new family health teams. There was a slow adoption rate for family physicians to move to that model, but once they moved to that model, for the physicians I talked to, their stress level went down.

Health committee  Don't you want me to answer that? We're in a race that never ends. There's a significant shortage of primary care right across Canada, and unfortunately we will have lineups. Without electronic health records to transfer files in real time or to have a portal so that physicians can dip in and read the file of a patient from another community, we're going to have these bumps along the way.

Health committee  It's long-term care, the community care access centre, the Meals on Wheels, the Alzheimer Society, and all the small community agencies.

Health committee  In my view, it's the absence of a national plan to address this on a national basis. We're spending close to 50% of our tax dollar in Ontario on the delivery of health care. I consider our health care professionals a national resource. It's 50% percent of our tax dollar. So we should invest in that with a strategy on how to attract them, how to retain them, how to make it easy for professionals to maximize their potential.

Health committee  No. I can defer that to Jack, seeing that he runs a CHC.

Health committee  I'd add that in our CHCs we've had great success in recruiting. A lot of our doctors are over the age of 50 and 60. They're winding down in their careers and their volumes, and they're working 20 hours a week at our CHCs. They bring their experience, their networks, their relationships, the relationships with the hospitals, to that CHC, and they're usually within the community they work in.

Health committee  Thank you. The federal government, from our view, could help—as they've assisted the provinces in the past with wait time strategies—to provide the focus on a provincial basis, a national basis on wait times, for critical issues that we face right across Canada. There are challenges with funding through Infoway, for example, and to provide the motivation and the investment to help us stitch our networks together is very important.

Health committee  One of the exciting changes in Ontario is that we have the LHIN, which stands for Local Health Integration Network. And we work with our CHCs all the time. I'd like to highlight Grand Bend, which is the centre of excellence. We have a senior population. They identify their needs through their board, they come to us through their admin staff, and we invest in them.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. First, let me speak to you today on behalf of the 14 LHINs in Ontario. I represent Lambton County, Chatham-Kent, and Essex County. We refer to it as the gateway to Ontario because of the two major bridges we have as access points. I'm relatively new to health care.