Health committee  We have to take a good look at the Canada Health Act. The Canada Health Act does not support or include interdisciplinary care for those who need it the most. It does not include care for chronic, complex illness. It doesn't include physiotherapy. It doesn't include psychology. I

Health committee  Absolutely. Virtual care is absolutely paramount in this. Look, we live in Canada. We know there are health disparities. We know that part of the health disparity includes where you live. If you live in a rural area—like where I'm from, in rural, small-town southern Alberta, an

Health committee  Yes. It's time for us to really step up and decide whether we are going to take care of our most vulnerable or not. That means looking at the Canada Health Act and deciding if we are going to cover interdisciplinary care or not. It's time to really take a look at that aspect. If

Health committee  I'm sorry. To be clear, that's the lifetime prevalence of people living without homes, in terms of traumatic brain injuries being that high. Looking at moderate to severe...10% of all brain injuries are because of overdoses occurring on our streets. That's just published in the

Health committee  I can give many success stories about patients. I didn't really want to go down that road. I think the concept.... I have patients who have gotten their jobs back, gotten their spouses back. Most important is when you help people get their children back. That's the biggest home

Health committee  Part of that is acceptance, accepting that some of the decisions and aspects of being in a health disorder such as addiction have also led to issues and that you have to deal with those issues. I also believe that people do remit and relapse because it's a chronic, complex illne

Health committee  You are correct. All prescribing that we do in addiction is about stabilization of that individual so we can move forward with treatment. As physicians, we also make sure there are no harms to the community or others when we prescribe. For instance, when we do a urine test with

Health committee  It's a staged approach. I could do this all day long. It would start with stabilization biologically and then move into the psychosocial treatment aspect. It would include treating the underlying mental health conditions and treating the trauma, but it would also be looking at w

Health committee  I think that, when we look at OAT, which is opioid agonist therapy—another term for it is medication for opioid use disorder—we have guidelines based on massive studies. Guidelines suggest first line A is buprenorphine or naloxone and first line B, the gold standard, is methadone

Health committee  Yes, well, there it is: There should be more access. We talked about the opioid crisis and how we got here. The reason we got here was the diversion of prescribed opioids. It was the over-prescribing. The people who were being prescribed and taking the medication were never the

Health committee  I believe that supervised consumption services are a part of a pathway of treatment and, like all harm reduction services, should be a part of the treatment algorithm. I think the biggest problem we have is that we pick one little piece to focus on and think that's all we need,

Health committee  Just to be clear, the consumption site in Lethbridge was transitioned to an AHS one out of the not-for-profit. It's still active and still going, and never has it turned someone away. There is a record of overdoses at all sites, whether one of these consumption sites exists or

Health committee  I think that, at the end of the day, it's about trying to create a system that makes sense, that's interconnected and not siloed. We have harm reduction, recovery-based and mental health silos, but the reality is that there's a lack of access to any of them, and that's really the

Health committee  They can walk in or they can self-refer. We get referrals from emergency departments, from in-patient groups, from primary care physicians, from counsellors and from psychologists. It's wide open. We have full, complete and absolute rapid access for anyone and everyone in Calgar

Health committee  Again, I'm of the belief of focusing on treatment and a process of such. At the end of the day, the prescription of recreational substances to anyone without a diagnosis and a treatment algorithm can be problematic, and there's really no research, evidence or peer-reviewed litera