We have to find a better way around the paperwork system and the number of all of these pre-approvals, and then their having to take paperwork with them to prove they were at the appointment. It's not only leading up to the appointment. It's once you get to the appointment and the paperwork beyond that.
Sometimes you have people who also, because of the travel times and all that, miss getting the specialist to sign the paper and then that impacts their next travel, so it's all of those pieces. They don't realize that it's right from the start of the system up and down, and it then impedes their ability to get future access to the program.
What we need to do as health care providers is to really work together to establish a system on how we can more collaboratively tackle the length of time it takes the administrative bureaucracy to do this. We have had a few providers here in Ontario who took it upon themselves to administer the NIHB program, but the sad reality is that they experienced the length of time and delay for getting the process payment from NIHB as well. Then what happens is that it impedes the ability of the community to continue to travel because they don't have enough cash flow to be able to do that.
Again, I think that, when we're looking at the long term and in the long run, if we're again comparing upstream to downstream, it's so much less costly to catch them in preventative-type stages. When we get into acute care, we're already talking like there's something to diagnose and something to treat. We've now missed this whole part of the system here where we could have prevented worse-case outcomes or outcomes that require more types of treatment.