Those are areas that are outside my lane, but I can answer generally. Far greater detail on them can be provided to you. Because it's such an important area, we have a specific deployment health section whose only purpose for existence is to do a long-term follow-up and evaluation study of all of the most current literature and to conduct original studies following up our troops.
With respect to your first question about what happens when troops retire from the armed forces, there's an extensive collaboration between DND and Veterans Affairs, and specifically between the medical elements of both those departments. There are progressive efforts that are improving continually, which the chief of military personnel, I believe, mentioned in his initial testimony to this committee, relating to that. But there's good coordination.
I don't know all of the details, but there's a common centre, for example, for the care of injured soldiers to enhance that kind of coordination. There are various efforts to ensure there's a smooth transition of all the clinical care records to Veterans Affairs. There's the involvement of the military medical staff in ensuring that Veterans Affairs and the soldier get information required for medical records to support whatever applications they have to Veterans Affairs to access additional services. There are efforts in our periodic health assessments to ensure that all of this is recorded as well for the long term, both for individual clinical mental health and for other physical disabilities, as well as for occupational exposures or environmental industrial exposures that may in the future result in some kind of harm.
All of that is either centrally recorded and/or in individual medical records. Those records are accessible to any CF member for provision to Veterans Affairs.
With respect to your second question, long-term evaluation post-Afghanistan is conducted primarily by this deployment health section that I've mentioned. Some of the records and some of the statistical data collection will end up having to be conducted by a different directorate, called the directorate of health services delivery. There's an effort that's progressively improving, that will be improving substantially once we have an automated information management tool in place, called the Canadian Forces health information system, that can permit the automated collection and aggregation of the data for analysis.
In the meantime, we have enhanced post-deployment health assessments that I mentioned earlier, which occur at three to six months post-deployment. Because we know that some operational stress injuries will manifest after that six-month point, we also have a periodic health assessment based on the Canadian task force on preventive health, those guidelines. Because those guidelines for younger populations were only once every five years, we determined that wasn't enough, particularly for mental health surveillance. So we will be compressing that down to doing it once every two years. That periodic health assessment includes mental-health-specific questions, validated questions, to help identify earlier mental health problems. So every two years, unrelated to the deployment, we'll also be able to carry on evaluating and to pick up earlier cases that might have been missed because they didn't manifest themselves before the six-month point.
Finally, there's a health and lifestyle information survey that we conduct once every four years. Again, it's conducted by another directorate, so I won't go into too much detail about it. I'll try to stick within my lane. There's a directorate of force health protection that looks after most of the preventive health programs, except for mental health, which is so important that it has a separate organization.
The health and lifestyle information survey, conducted once every four years, specifically asks questions from members, and the accuracy of that data is fairly well validated by other sources. The last one was conducted in 2004 and the next one will be in 2008. That will give us significant additional data. It will help us validate. It'll give us a better picture in a number of areas, including mental health. It's mailed out to thousands, or even tens of thousands, of Canadian Forces members, and there's a reserve component as well, so it involves a substantial number of reservists.
In addition to that, periodically, depending on the issue, there are ad hoc additional studies that are conducted. For example, there was a very extensive Gulf War series of studies conducted for the Gulf War veterans. So we have a whole series of efforts to try to follow up epidemiologically and to do health surveillance on individuals after they return from Afghanistan or any deployment.