I think I'll start. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
There are a couple of dynamics at play. One is that different waves of COVID have impacted different sectors. We know the terrible outcomes that happened in long-term care, for example, in the first wave. We've just heard Dr. Pichora talk about critical care, and in the third wave, critical care was pretty badly hit. Maybe it was the fourth wave; I'm losing track of the waves at this point. It really hit long-term care. We really stressed critical care, and this last one has really pushed all the buttons in medical-surgical units, in general hospital units. There are still some people going into ICUs, but hospitals are full, so we have three major sectors of the health care system that have really impacted nursing.
At the same time, older folks like myself, who might have been lured into staying a bit longer before retiring, are saying they can't do it anymore, so their retirement phase, which might have been five years or something, is being compressed because of the COVID experience, and we're seeing them saying they're going to leave the profession.
A Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions study showed us that, in most recent polling, it was the nurses at the beginning of their career and mid-career who wanted to leave or intended to turn over. You hit three big sectors; you hit new-career, mid-career and late-career nurses, and we're in a pickle.
The things that are going to help retain a nurse, for example, who's 63 are very different from those for a nurse who's 25. That 25-year-old nurse might be delighted to stay for a return of service if the student debt was cleared, for example, but that's not going to make a difference to nurses in their sixties. That's the kind of thing we need when we talk about a need to look at a very multifaceted approach to how we're going to treat the problems, not just the problem.