Obviously, we could spend hours on this, but I'll be as brief as possible.
In terms of expanding health care, we have to be a little bit creative as well. One thing is we need more people working in health care and we need more beds. That's a solid investment over time and it's a solid investment to train individuals.
We also have very skilled health care providers in the country who are not able to work. These are internationally trained graduates and foreign medical graduates. They're involved in multiple health care professions beyond medicine, nursing and other allied health care professions, and they are not able to work because Canada has not accepted their credentials. There's a lot of red tape in Canada preventing them from working. We have way more health care providers in the country than are mobilized at this point, and they're eager to work. That's an area we can explore further.
Related to preventing shutdowns, we have the tools. We have very simple tools, like masking. Masks alone don't stop a wave, but they certainly blunt a wave. They protect vulnerable individuals. We have vaccines and we have a growing array of therapeutics that are slowly launching in out-patient settings. That's really good. Vaccines keep people out of hospital. Therapeutics can keep people out of hospital. We have to have timely and equitable access to them.
My pharmacy colleague on this call will be much better prepared to answer this than me, but pharmacies and pharmacists are in every neighbourhood. They're accessible. They can do the testing. They can do the treatment. I appreciate that there are drug interactions. Who's better to look at drug interactions than a pharmacist? They're qualified health care providers who can provide timely access to health care on the neighbourhood corner, without some of the barriers that exist with more traditional aspects of care, like seeing your primary care provider.
We can expand on all of those fronts, but we have the tools and we'll have a growing array of tools to really help prevent people getting sick and landing in hospital, such that we don't have to, for example, cancel scheduled surgeries, like we've seen in the past.