I've noticed a lot of your questions today have to do with questions around planning: where's the plan for this, and where's the plan for that, and the other thing? I'd suggest to you that a plan is only as good as its implementation, and in fact we have plans out there, or at least there are plans out there. I could refer you to the 600- to 800-page pandemic national plan, which probably very few of us have actually read, although I, for one, have. And I could refer you to other plans that different municipalities, hospitals, and other health regions, and so on, have created, all of which have substance, have value to them. But the plan is only as good as the implementation.
It's in the implementation that we have begun to realize, through H1N1, that there are problems, and some of the problems that I have identified are the problems around communication. Somebody used the word “patchwork”. I think that in fact across this great country we've seen a patchwork. We've seen a patchwork of communicating with front-line providers, who, by the way, are some of the most important providers in this whole network. It's not the community medicine specialists necessarily, and not the intensive care experts, who in fact are looking after those who are dying. It's the vast majority of the population walking into the primary care centres who we should be paying attention to, because those are the people who are not walking in with labels on their foreheads that say they have H1N1, but need to be diagnosed and need to be treated and managed accordingly in order to deal with this situation before they get to intensive care units.
So I think it's the implementation that really needs to be focused on, the availability of resources. My comments ended simply with the fact that we're willing to work with both the public health agencies as well as local public health authorities. We haven't seen the same response back sometimes from some of those same places.