When I was talking about medical professionals, I was really talking about health professionals, not just physicians. We know we get better care when it's team care: where we have the opportunity to have the best prepared person for a particular area—it kind of goes back to scope of practice—who can be called upon from the team to deliver the care. It's really about that need to work in teams.
Frankly, with regard to the complexity of the care required by older people, and particularly those with dementia, they usually don't just have dementia. They have dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis. It's that complex care. It's more than what we can expect any one health professional to manage well. You need the team, and you need to have that team working well together with the resident, when that's possible, and with the family, always, in terms of assessing, making decisions, and then enacting that care.
That's the intent. We have to move from single providers. A problem in many nursing homes is that there is no team. We have very few registered nurses, some practical nurses, and then, mainly, health care aides. There may be a bit of help from physicians, who may visit weekly. Sometimes there is a bit of physiotherapy time and a bit of recreational therapy.
But frankly, given the numbers and the need, we don't have enough other professionals participating in teams to provide the best daily life and the best outcomes for the residents.