There's some basic information put out, but it's very passive, I would say. It links directly to the disability tax credit issue as well, which is so important as a gatekeeper program, and not just for the registered disability savings program, which is a fantastic program for financial security. Even provincially, in B.C. for example, we have a home renovation tax credit for seniors. We recently expanded that to people with disabilities. The eligibility criterion for that provincial tax credit is the DTC, and we're seeing more and more provinces use the federal DTC as the gatekeeper to other benefits. It turns out that, of the eligible people to access that, maybe 5% to 10% get it, because the rest can't get the DTC to get the provincial tax credit to do a home renovation to be able to live longer in their own homes.
We have a lot of work to do to provide better supports to physicians and nurse practitioners, who increasingly are being recognized as qualified health practitioners to do these assessments. There's an issue around reimbursements for filling out these forms. There's the issue of the ability of physicians to have direct communications back to departments, whether it's Canada Revenue Agency or Service Canada, and find out what was done incorrectly on the form, particularly for the DTC, which gets pushed back again and again, and improved communication materials targeted to physicians and nurse practitioners.
Quite frankly, again from my own anecdotal experience in B.C., some physicians see this as a burden. They don't really put much time into it. Some will fill out anything their patient wants; others are more suspicious, and others are more rigorous. Some of them are not sure what the right words are that will either trigger an acceptance or a rejection. We talk about awareness. There's the awareness and communication with key gatekeepers. We've added more and more obligations on physicians and nurse practitioners to be some of the gatekeepers to these essential programs in a way that I don't think we really appreciated 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. That was before medicare.
We have public health insurance. Surely to God we should be able to work this out very well with a system that's public and universal across the country. So there's a huge communications problem there.