Actually, when I was injured, I was working in a rural mental health clinic in Hanna. I was injured in a rollover car accident on my way to a team meeting. So I can certainly speak to this issue quite extensively.
The gaps for people living in rural areas are just tremendous. The human resources issue is profound. That is certainly one thing. Also, we can't attract clinicians in the same way you can't attract home support, because of the lack of wages necessary to sustain the employment of people.
As we're all NGOs here at this table, we're also employers, and it's very difficult to find quality staff when you're trying to hire people. In the mental health consumer movement, that's also a huge problem, because we're trying to get staff who have lived the experience of mental illness. If the wage isn't commensurate with meeting their basic needs, then it's really not something that, ethically, we can do. In the Alberta Network for Mental Health, in particular, we have operated without staff for the past two years, because we cannot pay somebody a wage that would allow them to even afford housing. Ethically, as a board, we feel we can't do that.
So that's where we're at. Right across the board, human resources is an absolutely profound issue.
Access to treatment has been helped by telehealth, but that really isn't the only thing that people need. In rural hospitals, there need to be at least one or two beds for some of the less severe, and perhaps shorter-term, mentally ill persons who don't necessarily need the big infrastructure of a city psychiatric ward, for example.
Sometimes transportation to treatment is an issue. If somebody has to go out of the community for treatment, there often isn't disability transportation. One example is that there is actually an allotment given in Alberta to rural municipalities for transportation. The problem is that this disability transportation money is not designated. Any dollar that goes to people with disabilities that is not designated often very quickly finds its way absorbed into general revenues. That practice must be stopped.