Jennifer made some wonderful points on the human resource side of things. There's one point I would add: We need to have a national strategy on getting people into these professions and retaining them there as well.

The retention is a really key point today. I've seen efforts in multiple provinces to recruit, but we're losing them on the retention side, and we do that for all of the reasons we've discussed here today. We're not making it a very welcoming work environment in terms of both the physical and psychological strains of the job and the lack of support that people feel, not just from their employers, but from the society as a whole. That's one point that I really wanted to get across. A lot of care workers feel like they're toiling in obscurity.

They are doing something that we terribly need them to do. I imagine that everyone in this room has had or has someone we love in a hospital—if not ourselves—or in a long-term care facility. We think a lot about them and their needs, but we need to focus on who cares for the caregivers in our society. There does need to be a strategy on recruiting and retaining people by developing a culture of valuing the health care worker.

That is part of a recruitment strategy, but it also comes to the second point, which is outside of the human resources side of things: how we actually fund and run the facilities. We do need more standardization across this country. I know that very clearly there's a division of powers between the federal and the provincial governments; however, the federal government provides the bulk of the financial resources that keep our health system up and running.

There are countless examples of where the federal government funds things that are constitutionally under provincial jurisdiction and does provide benchmarks or earmarked funding for certain priorities. We could have a national standard for the level of care that's appropriate in an acute care setting, in a home care setting or in a long-term care setting. That could be based on the number of care hours that a client receives. That also could be based on the population size and the needs of those individual provinces.

I think we need to look both at the human resource side and at the facilities themselves, because our recruitment and retention strategy is not going to work unless we're actually making efforts to improve the working conditions across our health care sector.

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