Yes, I did. I entirely agree with what our other two respondents have said. They have essentially highlighted that we need to pull together the information that is out there but that we haven't ever really looked at really. What are the true needs to serve the health of Canadians? Where do we have to specialize? Just like physicians, dietitians specialize as well. Do we need more dietitians in public health? Do we need more of them in the pediatric wards? Do we need them in palliative care? We don't know.
The mentoring and the geographic area—we also experience that. As dietitians, and I believe the medical laboratory technologists are in a similar situation, we don't really need to recruit more people to our education programs. There are lots of students wanting to get into university-accredited dietetics and nutrition programs. The problem is that among these keen students, who fought to get into these competitive programs, who needed high marks to get in and then did their four years, only about half of them get practicum training.
So in fact there are plenty of people out there who want to be dietitians, and after four years of university, unfortunately, there are quite a few people out there who are disappointed that they can't become dietitians. That, bizarrely, occurs in the face of vacancies, and in ten years' time there will be lots of vacancies.
So what are we going to do? There is no funding. If you're a dietitian who is really busy going out to your patients and then you are asked to do training, but there's no coordination and there's no extra budget for people to do the training, your accountability and your productivity statistics will look horrible if you spend time with students, and yet you're expected to train students.