I'll start with your first question, which Health Canada also answered. Certainly we rely on the leadership of Health Canada, but from a very operational perspective, we're a fairly small employer of about 2,400 health professionals.
We do very detailed operational planning. Each of our five regions has an operational plan for where the hiring needs to happen. We know that we have a continuous need for intake of nurses in the prairie region. We have an open process where we're always evaluating nurses who would be willing to come and work for Correctional Service of Canada. The prairies is one area where we do see a shortage of nurses.
We do have some needs, depending on how remote some of our institutions are. For example, Grande Cache is an area where we typically have challenges recruiting health professionals. There are some gaps with psychologists, but overall we have fairly good success in recruiting health professionals.
To answer your second question, yes, thank you for pointing that out. That really was a paragraph that talked about the overlapping scopes of practice. We did address that earlier, but to answer your question very specifically, we do have harm reduction programs. It includes the use of bleach kits and other types of measures such as that. We do not do needle exchange.
With regard to a methadone program, we have a very rigorous methadone program. It's an interdisciplinary team approach. Essentially you have an aspect where the physician, the nurse, and counselling will be provided, and there's ongoing, very regular routine monitoring of that particular program.
So yes, we do have that program in place.