Health committee  Thank you. The opportunity needs to build on what's actually being done around the world so that a centre like mine would be able to get a video feed, as well as information from the investigations and monitors, to be able to assist the teams that are there providing care, provi

Health committee  It's a big question. As for patients who present with it, there are several different types of presentations. What is one person's experience isn't necessarily the experience of everyone. The patients I see unfortunately are the sickest of the sick. When they come in, many of t

Health committee  What would I think of the health transfers? Should they be increased? Should they be adjusted? Certainly, with regard to the idea of increasing funding, there's not going to be any physician who says that we shouldn't fund more, although I think we need to fund smarter. I think

Health committee  There are always creative ways to do it. Any time there is a change in the system, there's actually an opportunity to make it better. We certainly have found a lot of efficiencies during COVID. Telemedicine certainly helped a lot of aspects. All patients don't need to come to a

Health committee  We were at 57 beds with the two campuses. Fortunately, believe it or not, critical care wasn't stressed in most centres across Canada, so we were roughly at about 80% in use. We never had to go into our pandemic areas.

Health committee  By the nature of your question, you know the answer, in that we were affecting other people's care. I think that is the reality. It's one thing to take away emergency surgery, which really did not happen; most of it was elective surgery that was impacted. There was some surge cap

Health committee  Field hospitals were explored. I was part of groups that explored and discussed them, but that's easier said than done. If we open a bunch of surge hospitals, we could open them, but how do we staff them? How do we supply them with equipment and things, and such? I think there

Health committee  It's a good question. Trying to boil the ocean is impossible for all of us, but I would really start with looking at long-term care. How do we get patients out of an acute care hospital who don't need to be there? I did allude to some of the challenges with end of life, and i

Health committee  Thank you for the question. It has always been a challenge of provincial versus federal, and I'm not so naive as to think there's a simple solution. However, a national standard is what most of our societies go by, and I think it's an easy opportunity for the federal government

Health committee  I can speak to the Ottawa Hospital but also Ontario. I think Ontario, as you pointed out, with our experience with SARS, was perhaps better prepared than some of our counterparts in that we've been planning this for about 15 years. We've had practice runs, be it with H1N1. What

Health committee  I think it's through talking and sharing experiences. I've actually been quite impressed with what has been provided by some of our societies as well as by government, at least my own government in Ontario, to allow us mental health and mindfulness types of strategies. I'll be h

Health committee  Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I am Dr. David Neilipovitz. I am an intensive care unit physician who has cared for COVID-19 patients in our intensive care unit during this pandemic. I have seen patients make miraculous recoveries from this vi