Thank you, Madam Chair. A couple of comments. At the present time, we continue to hold the budget in the department for the recruitment and retention activities. So the funding is showing up in this budget, several million dollars for the bursary programs and those kinds of things. The administration of the program is done to renew human resources organizations. Your specific question about the nurse recruitment, I do not believe at the present time we have a nurse recruiter that's a nurse. They did have one in the past and I believe it was vacant and then someone else is doing that job at the present time. I can get more information on that.
We have about $6 million in our budget that's related to various human resource programs primarily directed at nurses, but also nurse practitioners and health and social services professionals. On a weekly basis, the department works very closely with the HR folks, the come to all our management meetings, they come to all our meetings with the joint Senior Management Committee, which is all the boards, CEOs, as well as all the departments. So that part has actually worked very well.
The other thing that the HR group has done is they've actually expanded the number of people they have working on Health and Social Services because with the number of staff, we have -- 1,200 across the system -- we're a sizeable piece of the government's human resources and they realize that they need to give greater attention and they've been working towards that.