Let me start with the last part and, as always, I'll turn it over to Debra for specific details.
Let me say that none of these things are surprises to us. We have been working all these issues all the way through and, as I said earlier, even before we had the aboriginal health human resources initiative, we had begun to turn our minds to all of these things. We have begun to address all of them.
The educational barriers are one of those areas where we could easily have spent all the money that we had by going into the schools and trying to get kids to take maths and sciences. That's not our responsibility. We really are looking at the workforce.
As a result, we've collaborated with the Department of Indian Affairs. We've tried to make available to them, and with them, materials promoting the value of taking maths and sciences if you want to take health careers. We have an arrangement with that National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation. They do extremely well-attended career fairs on reserves, in communities, and in large cities that draw in aboriginal high school students and show them the joys and the beauties of health careers.
Those are really good opportunities to emphasize the importance of continuing in your math and science studies, so I think we've begun to address that. The fact that we're seeing more and more people signing up for health careers is evidence that we're beginning to get somewhere on that one.
The challenges on the pay scales are very complex. Those are very difficult, particularly as they relate to people who are employed by the first nations. We hold no sway over what the first nations can pay. We can't tell them what they must pay this professional or that professional.
Where possible, we pass on any increases that we get, such as the increases that we get every year on our contribution agreements, which is how we fund the first nations. We pass those along, and they can then top up the pay of their health care workers. In the last year we asked the Assembly of First Nations to begin to do some more detailed work on pay scales. We'll maintain a keen interest in that as it goes forward.
Maybe I'll ask Debra if she could answer some of the specific challenges on data collection, although I think she did provide quite a bit of information at the beginning.