It's a really good question. I think the issue with the backlog is that we think this is a temporary problem that we can get beyond, assuming that we can get the health human resources that we need. But how do we hire into something that's going to last two or three years before we clear this? Then what do we do?
We think this issue about access to health care is going to continue well beyond the impact of this pandemic. We are currently hiring as many people as we can for nursing, and for physicians and surgeons, etc. The issue is, how do we keep these people? At SickKids we are over-hiring as much as we can and we are not able to actually keep our heads above water. At the moment, for example, at SickKids we normally would run 16 ORs. Now we can only run 14, because we don't have the nursing support.
The physicians, the nurses, everyone is willing to do this. We are willing to work evenings and to work weekends, but we need the people in place to do that. It's going to last for several years. Then once we get beyond that, we think it's going to require additional resources to keep things under control.