Thank you, Madam Chair. There were many recommendations in the report, some of them that have made a huge impact across the board. For example, we have introduced an allied health recruitment unit that's made a difference in terms of the ability to recruit and provide consistency in allied health recruitment across the Territories. It's starting to reduce the number of agency nurses that we're needing to use and has established a more stable casual pool. So that was one of the areas.
We have revised part of our approach to recruitment so that references and regrets can be done more quickly than they were in the past.
We've made a number of changes in the pay area. As the Minister indicated in his opening comments, we moved to most of those recommendations on January 1st of this year and since that time the staff in that unit have managed to stay current on all pay items that have come in since that time and, as well, have dealt with...As of today, it's 40 percent of the outstanding backlog has been dealt with in two months after implementing all of their recommendations. They also gave us a lot of information that has allowed us to save costs on the upgrade to PeopleSoft and make the right decisions in moving to a reduced customization and enhanced usage of that system. That includes the implementation of self-service, which again improves the accuracy and timeliness of payment. It's meant, for example, that shift workers are no longer working on estimated paycheques and overtime payments that can sometimes be two to three months late. They're actually getting paid on the next paycheque for those kind of payments that they're due.
So those are a very small list of some of the examples the Minister would be able to provide, if he wished, in greater detail at some point. But those are just some of the examples of the things that we've done out of the Hackett report.