I'm going to leave the specific question of footwear aside for a moment, if I may, ma'am, and we'll come back to it.
On the general question of how we take observations from theatre and feed them into policy, the main part of the tool is a NATO epidemiological data collection system known as EPINATO, an obvious acronym that stands for epidemiology for NATO. It's a viciously detailed spreadsheet that the folks in theatre have to fill out on a weekly basis and send back through the medical chain. Our director of force health protection collects those results and analyzes them to see if there are trends.
The tool is imperfect. The tool requires a skilled person on the front end to decide how to codify everything that happens so that the data make sense on the far end. Theoretically, things should be able to be identified through the EPINATO tool, analyzed by our epidemiologists and our occupational health specialists and our sports medicine specialists and the director of force health protection, and that would form a link back into policy.
I would have to get back to you on specific questions of initiatives that have been taken on footwear. I'm perfectly aware that we stopped training in combat boots, and that was a very good step forward. I'll say anecdotally that in my career I have seen what is probably the fifth iteration of different kinds of combat boots people have tried in order to get it right. I think that's in the grey area between the practice of medicine and the acquisition of equipment for the Canadian Forces.