Thank you, Mr. Chair. Specifically
in the departmental realignment, one of the items we addressed was that we had a division that was referred to as the Territorial Integrated Services, which included some aspects of health, some aspects of social services and some aspects of public health. Over the past two years there’s been an increasing sort of profile in the public health area, in particular since the SARS outbreak in Toronto. The Department of Health and Social Services felt it probably was important for us to place much more emphasis on the public health side of things. So I have tasked the chief medical officer to do some work to define for us a structure that would allow us to continue to do the work we do to support our hospitals and our primary care system but at the same time bring increased emphasis to the public health side of things.
There are positions that were identified in the health area, but we thought it would be premature to eliminate those until we had completed the realignment and I had taken the recommendations of the chief medical health officer.