Health committee  Yes, you're right. There is a national home care association, but it's primarily voluntary. If emphasis could be placed on a national home care policy that recognizes and supports family members who want to give good care, but that doesn't assume they are the only care provider

Health committee  One of my concerns is what's called a “first bed policy” at a nursing home: an older adult in acute care may be transferred to the first available bed. That means that it may be 30 or 40 kilometres or miles away from where their family is. Although we want to reduce the acute car

Health committee  From our perspective, our primary role is the education and support of health care professionals, because if we can educate health care professionals on how to work with and for older adults and their families, we can reduce acute care waiting lists. We can reduce acute care admi

Health committee  I'll just add that there are a number of self-management programs in this country, one at the University of Victoria. I've totally forgotten the name, but it's just one of a number. They're not massive in scope, but they are certainly demonstrating that they are cost-effective an

Health committee  It's not a key priority for us right now in terms of our theme teams, but it's a well-established fact within the research community in this country—and I would defer to my colleagues as well—that caregiving practices and the health status of older adults from a variety of ethnic

Health committee  We actually already have a tool that we adopted from the Canadian Coalition for Seniors' Mental Health, which is funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. NICE's focus is to take strong tools that are evidence-based, that are primarily Canadian, and distribute them for all he

Health committee  The tools are actually available on our website and distributed nationally, across the country. Right now we're tracking, and we've had probably half a million tools distributed, of which a significant percentage have been linked to depression, delirium, dementia, and that area.

Health committee  That is a relatively recent theme. Just for your information, we initially started with five theme teams--caregiving, for example, and elder abuse. About 18 months ago we were asked by a number of our members and people in the public to look at the concept of ethnicity, recognizi

Health committee  The Chinese Canadian group was the first. The most important reason was because of its percentage in the population, of course. The second reason was that we have certain colleagues who have a strong interest in ethnocultural issues with Chinese Canadians. Since we simply cannot

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I offer my apologies for not bringing either carrot snacks or apple wedges, but I'm not sure they would have fit in my briefcase. As context, the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly was established about five years ago through funding from th