Thank you, Mr. Chair and ladies and gentlemen of the committee.

I'll be honest. I'm not quite sure what exactly my role is, or what you'd like from me. Things unravelled very quickly yesterday afternoon. I apologize for being late. There's absolutely no parking in downtown Ottawa, apparently.

I'll tell you what I do. Maybe that will help guide the questions you may have for me.

I am predominantly an ICU doctor. I work here in the city at the Ottawa Hospital. I'm also a general internist. In 2018, I started volunteering at what is known as Ottawa Inner City Health, predominantly because I had a lot of experience in a previous life when I was a pharmacist—before I joined the dark side. I used to work in downtown, inner-city Detroit. I saw the problems that different social systems and a lack of health care can cause. The emergency department was essentially the primary deliverer of health care for the population of inner-city Detroit.

When I wrote my medical school essay, I foolishly said that one day I was going to open up a downtown clinic and look after people who don't have equitable access to health care. When I came to Ottawa, one of my colleagues, Dr. Jeff Turnbull, had already started this. I called Jeff up one day and said that I had to start walking the walk and not living a lie, because I said this is what I was going to do when I applied to med school. It was about time I got off my butt and started walking the walk. That's how I joined Ottawa Inner City Health. I took over from Jeff as the medical director of Ottawa Inner City Health in 2022, just as we were nearing the end of the pandemic.

I work downtown as a frontline physician looking after the homeless and the vulnerably housed in Lowertown and across a variety of different supportive housing and community shelters across the city. I'm responsible for the programs we develop, implement and monitor. Predominantly, those programs are run by frontline nurses, which demonstrates that you don't need a physician at the front line to provide health care. This can be done by people who are kind, compassionate and interested in delivering the care they currently do.

I'll stop there.

Transcript

Discussions (0)