I would answer the question in two ways. First of all, innovation is already happening in the Canadian armed forces. In the health services facility that has been built at Base Borden, the training they're doing now, particularly with regard to the physician assistants, is head and shoulders over what they were doing even a decade ago.
Some of the physician assistants I work with in our hospital and in my office are soldiers who have been in military service for 17 or 20 years. They've had the traditional trade medic training and they've gone back to Borden for the subspecialized training program in which they do two extra years of training, one in the classroom and one working in offices and hospitals like ours. It's almost the equivalent of the last two years of my medical training in medical school, in terms of what they get in didactic learning.
So that level of innovation is what they bring to the table. They bring a tremendous amount of experience as well. Physician assistants aren't physicians. They are specifically called physician extenders in the military. The military has had a physician shortage for eons. This is one of the ways they've chosen to fix it. These people come out of the program we have with a skill set that is almost at the level of a family doctor, almost at the level of a nurse practitioner, but they're under the direct supervision of physicians.
My second part of the answer would be that the technology should be for equipping those physician assistants with knowledge when they need it and also with communications skills to get back to the physician they're talking to. Many of them are available by a telephone or satellite telephone connection to those who are supervising them when they're on the very front lines.