Our hope is that these will not be permanent positions. There’s a lot of work involved in stepping back and looking at how you’re delivering a program, how to change it, developing
the plans to implement change and to train staff while the people who are delivering the program, the medical travel staff, are doing their day-to-day work, for example.
Another possible shared service is in the area of finance. We again have finance staff in all the authorities that we can’t pull away from their day jobs to do this design. These will not be permanent positions, but the Member raises a good point that two years is not a long time to implement substantial change like this. It seems like a long time but somehow we never seem to get done when we think we will. If we are successful in negotiating an extension of THSSI funding with the federal government that might support continuing this work until such time as we’re able to implement the changes and it becomes core business. Having said that, we know we have a two-year time frame, we know we have the funding for two years and we’re making every effort to get the work done.