Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Member bringing this question forward. We recently reorganized speech language pathology to focus on more equitable service delivery for children in age birth to five years old. So we did that knowing that this is a critical period of a child's development and that there are considerable wait times for rehabilitation services, and we wanted to make sure that we could improve the turnaround time for these basic screening tools that practitioners use with this group. So equity is really our concern here, and the refocus of service in speech language pathology is the means that we're taking.

We have high staff vacancy rates in these rehabilitation service areas, and so as a result we have long wait times. The problem is that as with other healthcare professionals, there is a very strong demand for these -- for these professions and not a very robust workforce and so we, like everywhere else in the country, have experienced a shortage of people in these areas and the result is unfortunate wait times for patients. Thank you.