Veterans Affairs committee  Overall, within the department, there's about a 60% approval rating, if you take the combination of traditional veterans and CF.

Veterans Affairs committee  Last year, from April 2005 to 31 March 2006, there were 28,599 disability pension applications made, and that was under the old Pension Act.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's how many were actually processed in the department.

Veterans Affairs committee  The next step in the process that an individual has, if they're not satisfied with the departmental decision, is to actually request a departmental review. We will do a review. About 10% of the cases go back for review, and we get roughly the same approval rating out of the reviews.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll attempt to answer generally, and then, if I miss anything, Ken will add some additional points. Basically, you can take the case of Sergeant Jones, who was mentioned earlier by Mrs. Hinton. If that individual came into the system today and had been medically released from the armed forces, he would be eligible for a disability award for injuries of up to $250,000.

Veterans Affairs committee  In each of those locations, we have an average of about 15 to 17 staff on each team.

Veterans Affairs committee  There's usually one person to that type of assignment. But they have access, as Ken said, to centralized expertise in the region, for rehabilitation and mental health support. That's something we've built with the introduction of the new Veterans Charter. Plus, there are networks of communication and advice that exist at head office that work very closely with the field staff.

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't know exactly how it works within DND, but when they actually are leaving the forces, we work with DND to encourage everybody to have a transition interview with one of our social workers, one of our area counsellors. We've been very successful in that. We've had a very high participation rate.

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. You're quite correct. And even with the transition interview, you may not pick this particular malady up until years later.

Veterans Affairs committee  The one thing with these unseen injuries is that there rarely is any evidence of the traditional type to make that determination. But certainly for anybody who is out of the system for a number of years, the new Veterans Charter was designed to be able to help those people. If they come back to the department and they can demonstrate—and we help them demonstrate, actually, with medical advice and other assessments—a service-related re-establishment need, they can go directly into this rehabilitation program that Ken talked about.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, there would be an assessment. That's what I'm saying. There would have to be an assessment as to whether or not there was a need, based on a service-related re-establishment need. That's our technical term for that process of assessment to determine. There would then have to be follow-up assessments of the degree of operational stress injury, and then there would be a diagnosis of that.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for that comment. We really feel very strongly, as you do, that we'd like to be able to help in that case and other cases like it. We make every effort we can to help and we will continue to work on it. In terms of professionals trained in psychiatry, we agree there needs to be more work put into the development of capacity across the country in that.

Veterans Affairs committee  We'd like to get that back to you, because it was a professionally done survey using statistical sampling within the plus or minus 5% result.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, we can get that for you, and also the approach that was taken with those types of clients.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes.