Health committee  Absolutely. One of my other roles was chairing our alternate funding planning committee at the University of Alberta. It's worked in a number of ways. If we had methods such as electronic medical records, as you point out, then we wouldn't put the specialists at a disadvantage.

Health committee  Our various professional bodies go through the evidence, and that's how we come up with the guidelines on the use of pharmaceutical agents. Obviously, if they've been recommended, they must have benefit. Other people—the health economists—will then come to do the various cost uti

Health committee  I will give you a short answer to a long problem. One of the difficulties, as mentioned, is that we provide no resources to our family doctors. We like to beat up on them, and often as specialists we tell them, you're doing a poor job, look at the poor levels of blood pressure

Health committee  We do it in a number of ways. Would you like me to comment on some first nations issues while we are on that? We have some specific strategies there as well, and we have done considerable work. One way we do that is by knowing all the people in our jurisdiction who have diabetes

Health committee  That question commonly comes up, and we ask it ourselves. But when the providers get together and we ask the question of each other, we haven't been running across any. One of the strategies and techniques we use is we point out to the patient that this information is available

Health committee  May I respond as well, Mr. Chairman? I agree with you. There's a whole host of things we can do. I'll give you one example of a patient across town in our region who had this methicillin-resistant staphylococcus, one of the most problematic causes of infection. It showed up at m

Health committee  To address the first part of the question, there are other techniques we can use to extend our physician abilities, and using other health care professionals will certainly extend the capabilities of the existing physicians that we have. As you can probably tell, I could go on fo

Health committee  Thank you very much for this opportunity to present this morning. We had a couple of days' notice, but we'll be happy to forward some written materials to the committee. We come from the non-procedural end of the spectrum, from the chronic disease area, and we'll highlight one o