I'm going to again preface my question by saying my area of expertise is not administration and service provision in mental health. I'm going a bit from my clinical experience and my work on this report and on this topic.
I think it's highly variable. I think there are groups that do not have quick and appropriate access. I see that every day in my practice. Particularly in first-line care, people are waiting a long time for pretty simple things. I see people who have great access to mid-level care, but when they need something subspecialty, it's difficult to get—and the opposite. It depends on where you live in the country, unfortunately.
You see people who actually are quite severely affected and they actually have—that's a good thing, right, the system actually works sometimes—appropriate services that are at a level of intensity that is needed for the care of those folks. I do think it's highly variable. Obviously, like all health care services, it's worse, I think, and access is poorer the farther away you are from urban centres. In urban centres you have lots of providers, but there's a discontinuity there that maybe is less obvious than in rural areas. That's something I experienced when I did locums up north, where there was less provision but it was actually more coherent.
I think there's a lot of variability.