Certainly from speaking to our members—and I'm sorry I don't have one here today. It's a very busy time for pediatricians because there are lots of respiratory illnesses going around and pediatricians don't like to take office time away, as important as they feel this is. They deal with these families every day and they see the struggles they face.
As Madame Page pointed out, for many of these illnesses, the family is dealing not only with a sick child, but they actually have to leave their home community to receive the tertiary care in a pediatric health care centre and they may have no income support. The pediatricians see families who make a very difficult decision to split up for the time their child is being cared for. Say it's somebody from Cape Breton. The mom and dad will go down to the IWK in Halifax and somebody else will stay home with the other children.
As I said, this is a great change, and I think it will be important to monitor it to make sure that it does meet the needs and to look for that flexibility. The other thing for me that would be very important is that the actual application process be as simplified as possible.
Some parents may work and then be off for two weeks, work for a month and be off for a month. You don't want a complicated and elongated process every time they need to reapply for it.