Health committee  The short answer to that question is no. In the first wave, we were governed by media appearances on what was happening in northern Italy and New York City. Thankfully, we had a few weeks' time to prepare for this potential onslaught of the novel coronavirus. We felt very much

Health committee  I believe that's Dr. Kapur.

Health committee  I would echo Dr. Buchman's call for a national health human resources strategy. What can happen is that Nova Scotia trains an emergency physician who suddenly finds himself up in southwestern Alberta. We need to get a handle, especially in the emergency department, on the numbe

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I think it's all hands on deck in the coming weeks, as we expect a bit of a surge. We have concerns that elderly physicians, out of a sense of social conscience, good citizenship or community spirit, will feel compelled to go back to work. We have to

Health committee  Is that a question for me?

Health committee  Okay, thank you. Yes, I think there is. We've been very clear. For five years now, we've been saying we have a critical shortfall of emergency physicians, and that's going to get worse at a time when the population is getting older and not necessarily healthier. We're talking ab

Health committee  I don't mind weighing in. Nobody is discounting for a moment the concerns of our nursing colleagues, who are the backbone of the emergency health care system—truly, no argument. The reality of it is that we need to keep a bit of perspective on this, and I think that may be a l

Health committee  Excuse me. Nobody is being dismissive of our nursing colleagues, not for a moment. We work side by side. We are a team, but we have to let a bit of science into this discussion as we know it and as we understand it going forward, unless we want people to actually contract a fatal

Health committee  Actually, I'd be happy to respond. We have talked extensively of lessons learned from previous issues such as SARS, H1N1, Ebola and MERS, and, quite frankly, I think there are some lessons that have gone unheeded. One of the major ones is about the consistent lack of surge ca

Health committee  There is no national real-time system that I'm aware of. Data gathering varies a lot from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some data elements in some places are automated, but at least some data elements are manually reported, I think, pretty much everywhere.

Health committee  That's a broad statement. Obviously, the more accurate the data is and the faster we can get it up to the leadership groups, the better it would be.

Health committee  The answer.... That's a loaded question. I think what is happening in my hospital, as an example of what's happening across the country, is preservation of personal protective equipment. Some would call it rationing. Certainly, our nurses are being told to use two surgical masks

Health committee  I'll let Howard take that question.

Health committee  I'm not sure actually if we were, to be straight thinking about this. We recognize that we had a lead time of several weeks, when we were looking at what happened in northern Italy and New York. Largely this has been an effort based strictly on our own membership trying to stream

Health committee  The long and short of it is that we haven't.