Do we have all day?

Thank you very much for your question. We're also connected as eastern nurses.

The first thing is a health human resource strategy. We have a population of 40 million in Canada. We have one million health care workers, but there's no strategy for any of them. They provide great care. We need to bring in all the stakeholders you mentioned and develop a strategy. Help the provinces and territories with the evidence. We have amazing researchers, amazing data analysts and amazing strategists in this country, and we commission them for report after report, but there's nothing pulling it together.

The extra funding announced two years ago was greatly appreciated. I'm sure every health care employer is saying the same thing, but because we're in a crisis, they have a hard time putting it where it should be going, which is in primary health care, home care, enhancing our long-term care and, of course, helping our acute care. Acute care is in crisis, and when you're in a crisis mode, you just fix the crisis mode. That's my critical care nurse way of thinking, but that's what happened.

With our nurse practitioners and the whole aspect of primary health care, the biggest barrier is access. We don't have enough in the country. In the U.S., they have 100 times more nurse practitioners than we have in Canada. Is it the cost? It's because of knowing that we need to have more access to primary health care.

The other aspect is the method of payment. We're still backwards in how we pay our physicians via fee-for-service and how we pay our nurse practitioners via salaries. I know nurse practitioners in P.E.I. who will replace a locum—a replacement physician—and they get their salaries with overtime and are expected to work 24 hours.

Really, we have to make our system better.

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