I think that number has to start with the needs of our patients, residents and clients who are in the health care system. I don't think anyone knows of an arbitrary number that we could impose Canada-wide across the system that would fix all of the issues.
The challenge is that the funding that's in place currently doesn't have any bottom built in for staffing levels. Some provinces establish, for example, the number of hours of care that a resident receives in a day. That varies greatly across the country. We have a lack of standardization. It makes it very difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison from one province to another. I think the staffing levels need to be assessed on a facility-by-facility basis, particularly with an eye to the needs of the residents, clients and patients who are within that facility. Arguably, there will be those in our system who need more care than others. That depends on their age, how ambulatory they are and the medications they're on.
Current legislative frameworks province by province do establish some thresholds for, just as an example, how many registered staff need to be present. That does start to create a bit of a framework for how many people are actually in the facility, but when it comes down to the number of care aides, for example, who are in a facility, there is no standard anywhere in this country other than the number of hours of service that a resident receives. Because of the way we're allocating the existing staff, we're at times increasing the risk by having people working alone. Simply reallocating existing time resources, with an eye to the needs of the facility and the residents, could help to ensure that the workers and residents are safer before we even put another person into the system.