The history is that this started as a collaboration between the College of Family Physicians and the Canadian Psychiatric Association, based on problems that the College of Family Physicians was getting from its members about its relations with psychiatry, difficulty in getting referrals and so on.
To give you a single example, I worked for about five years in the Northeast Community Health Centre, in Edmonton, on a part-time basis as the psychiatry consultant. This is a community mental health centre, which had family medicine, maternal care, public health, child care, and a couple of other things as well. All of these services work collaboratively. The mental health program was set up there to be a support to the other programs and not to assume an independent life of its own.
In my work there and the work of the staff, which included an addiction service as well, this mostly meant seeing patients the other services had seen and thought had a problem. It was seeing those patients with them, developing a treatment plan jointly, and assigning who was going to do what. We had some problem cases and we'd have a large case conference and assign responsibilities. It was not a case of saying this is my problem and I'm handing it over to you; it was a case of which of us was going to do what to help this patient with these defined problems.
Does that—