Ultimately, we haven't seen a significant increase in human resources at all. I know that a colleague of mine talked about things being a lot better in one spot here in Ottawa, but that's very few and far between. We're struggling. We have wait times for patients for access to palliative care in Nova Scotia.
I mentioned the challenges now faced by the palliative care teams, partially because we are part of the aging demographic, so we're not even keeping up with those in the palliative care specialty teams who are retiring. We're not producing new specialists quickly enough. There aren't enough positions open for training in Canada, and that's something we've been talking about for quite a while with the universities to try to increase that.
Also, there's a lack of primary care. News on that just came out yesterday in Nova Scotia. Ultimately, we have a population of about a million people, so respectively it's not that large compared to other places in the country. However, about 120,000 people now don't have a primary care provider. That's like one in 10 people in our province.
As those people don't even have access to primary care, the only way they receive palliative care is that they end up in the emergency department and subsequently get referred. Our palliative care teams see these people and virtually have to hang on to them because there's nobody else to care for them. That's creating another load on our palliative care teams, and that's becoming more and more challenging.