Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the mid-term solution for us, not even mid-term, is training our own northern nurses and getting them trained to the point where they can work in the communities having a competitive pay and benefit package at the community level that will attract them to stay there, as well as enough support and things like training and professional development, that they will consider it a career.
We are also looking at an annual allowance for nurses in small communities that will give them compensation that recognizes the circumstances they work under, the isolation and pressure of being on call all the time and where they don't have a lot of support.
We are also taking steps to bring into play nurse practitioners, which will raise the level of professional capacity of the nurses. We would like to be able to not only train them, but also work with the nursing association to come up with the method to have nurses that have a lot of experience to take a refresher course and write a challenge exam so we can get nurse practitioners as well into the field. We've also had a relationship with northern Ontario where they are training nurse practitioners in lead communities to have nurses get experience in using some of the communities in the North as a practicum site for some of that particular training. So those are some of the things we are putting into place attempting to get a longer-term workforce in place. Thank you.