I will say one thing we have noted during the pandemic as a result of the delays is that cancers are much more advanced than they ever were before. The things we see are horrendous and we never saw those.
We're all trying to work to catch up. The hours are really quite long and we need more staff. Part of it is not just to hire more staff but actually have the hospitals allow for those staff to work.
This is what happens. A certain number of physicians can do a certain amount of work, but now we don't have the nurses or the clerical support. The hospitals try to reduce their budgets by reducing the amount of help that is given to the physicians and to the allied health force, and that increases our burden. The burden is always on us because we are not employees of the hospital but our own individuals working within the hospital care.
At the end of the day we do need to increase the number of physicians to combat the burden, but the system has to ensure that they give us the levels of support to work because, as was mentioned before, we do everything that we do but we don't have the support now to fulfill our mandate of caring for patients.