Sure. Thank you very much for this question.

I'm fortunate to have, on this panel of witnesses, people who can speak much more scientifically and eloquently about the discovery research, the biomedical research, realizing that Canada has traditionally funded a spectrum of research from biomedical to health services research. I'm just trying to cover the waterfront with that statement.

My expertise would be most appropriately applied to the latter half of those priorities, at the end of that sentence. I think that artificial intelligence has great promise for children's health. I think making that a funding priority should be very clear to everybody on this call.

The last two, health technology assessment and regulatory approval, are things that really hit home for me as a practising surgeon, because much of the technology and many of the surgical devices that we use in children really are off-label—meaning, unregulated uses of technology and devices that were developed for adults. That presents challenges from the perspective of Health Canada in the sense that we are not allowed to get into this country some devices that are the standard of care for children's surgery everywhere else in the world, particularly in the United States.

That problem is not unique to surgical devices but also to pediatric medicines. It relates to the fact that the market for some of these—in my instance, surgical devices—is so tiny, even when you extrapolate it across Canada to 16 children's hospitals. For the companies that make this technology, it's just not worth the expense of getting it approved in Canada.

This was really unveiled in the pandemic when we had supply chain issues, and we simply could not get diagnostic tools into Canada. It forced some of these regulations to be fast-tracked.

I would just highlight that this is a deficit in our care. I think it is within the control of this group and others to allow greater consideration of medicines and devices that are proven safe and effective in other jurisdictions, particularly with the FDA, and to see ways to get them into the hands of care providers, who are uniquely interested in applying that device that is approved for use in children.

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