I want to share that it's a little hard to get our hands on 428,000 RNs and nurses in all categories and where they work, because they're all through the system. Therefore, how you do something? Simply, it is tough.
When we talk about innovation, let me give you one example. At Toronto Western Hospital, they discovered that they had an awful lot of admissions of older folks transferred in from nursing homes, and we know that every time we transfer an older person, they're never quite the same after. They never recover the same way we would, and the older you get, the more of a problem it is.
They undertook an initiative to see if they could reduce the number of transfers by sending nurses out from the emergency room to those places rather than bringing the people in. A one-year trial showed an 80% reduction in the number of people being transferred. There were huge implications for those people and for the costs. How could governments help? Someone needs to send the nurse out. Someone needs to pay for the cab to send the person out there.
When I got sick in London, England, last year, I did what one always does. I googled, “What do you do when you're dying in London?” It said to go to a certain place, a clinic. First of all, they didn't ask for any information, other than my name. They didn't want any money. They didn't want to charge me for the drugs. That was the whole thing, and it was run entirely by nurses. There were seven nurses and 200 patients a day. They triage you within three minutes and you're out the door in two hours. They weren't affiliated with a doctor or a hospital. They were nurse-run clinics.
In answer to your question about how we could work with governments, we're ready to set those things up. We have a nurse practitioner workforce across the country and a registered nurse workforce. We just need some help to make it happen, to move it. There has to be a place for them to go. They have to be regulated to be able to do that. I think we're ready to jump on some of those for a fairly reasonable cost.