Jack Layton and his team of New Democrats will implement a five step plan to cut wait times, train new health professionals and defend Medicare:

1. Train substantially more health care professionals – including more doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and midwives – to ease staffing shortages and cut wait times. We will work with the provinces and territories to make it happen:
   • We will implement a program designed to increase the number of doctors and nurses trained in Canada by 50%. As part of that program, we will offer to forgive the student loans of health professionals who commit to dedicate the first ten years of their careers to family medicine.
   • This program will give Canada up to 28,000 additional nurses, doctors and other health professionals to care for you and your family.
2. Work with the provinces and all public health care providers to adopt "best practices" and implement an innovation strategy – as has already been successfully demonstrated in leading public clinics and hospitals. We will:
   • Invest in the expansion of drug and alcohol addiction and prevention programs – including harm reduction programs – in partnership with the provinces and territories.
   • Establish Mental Health Crisis Response Centres, modeled after the leading edge one being built by the Manitoba NDP that have successfully diverted people from Emergency Rooms, allowed health care professionals to provide better care, and reduced waiting times.
   • Work with the provinces and territories to expand the use of nurse practitioners and multidisciplinary clinics, taking the strain off other parts of the health care system.
   • Expand home care to reduce pressures on families and women who are now providing care, and to further cut hospital backlogs and wait lists.
3. Protect the system and stop privatization. Our health care system is both a cherished Canadian institution and an important competitive advantage we have as Canadians. We will:
   • Prohibit the use of federal funding to support any form of parallel, private for-profit service delivery and fully enforce the provisions of the Canada Health Act.
   • Require transparency and accountability by provinces and territories on their compliance with and enforcement of the principles of the Canada Health Act, including reporting public and not-forprofit delivery versus private delivery.
4. Work with the provinces to develop long term strategies to better manage chronic diseases, such as diabetes, and lifelong medical disabilities and conditions, such as autism.
5. Reaffirm long-established public policies to ensure that women have the right to safe therapeutic abortion services, in consultation with their physicians.