Thank you to all of our presenters for being here today. Hearing you today I feel as though a light bulb has turned on and we're realizing how complex this question is regarding scope of practice and regulation and all the different players involved. I don't know how you manage to navigate the system. Anyway, it's a very interesting subject.
I have two questions.
First, as I understand it from what you've said today, the scope of practice, which falls under provincial or territorial legislation, can differ from province to province, and even where it does differ, there can be conflicts with another profession in that what is actually regulated you may not actually be able to practise. I think I got that from pretty well all of you.
I wonder how we solve that. Is the ideal situation to basically have one scope of practice that's agreed to for RNs, for nurse practitioners, for LPNs, and for psychiatric nurses apply across the country? I'm not quite clear on that. If your answer is yes, I assume then that the role of the federal government is to help facilitate that. Do you see that as a goal, to try to bring some sort of conformity?
For example, I know that in various trades there is what we call the Red Seal program, through which you can get to a level where you can then operate anywhere across the country. I get the sense that we don't have that in the nursing professions. That's one question that maybe Dr. Mildon and Ms. Coghlan could answer.
Second, I was very interested, Dr. Mildon, in your statistic. I think you said that 60% of nurses are in acute care, 15% are in community care, and 10% are in long-term care. There's the whole question of health human resource planning. I imagine the question of shortages varies from place to place, but I still hear stories from nurses who work at the big hospitals in Vancouver, for example, who say that they're continually on call, and they're practically exhausted from stress and overwork. Even in the larger places, there seem to be shortages, so God knows what it's like in small communities where there aren't any resources at all or there are very few.
There is the question of shortages and how we need to make a shift. There is a growing need, for example, in home care, long-term care, and palliative care, and there is more of a shift into community care, but we don't want to do that at the expense of acute care. In terms of the planning for human health resources, where are we falling behind if we want to make sure that doesn't happen?
I realize that's a very big question, but anything you can do to help us sort out what our role should be from a federal perspective would be very helpful. Could you address both of those questions, and if Ms. Coghlan would also like to answer, that would be helpful.