Thank you for that question.
I actually don't think it's more prevalent that people get frustrated and leave. When I think about the teams I know well across the country, Edmonton has had a very stable group of clinicians. As for my team and the team in Halifax, you can't get these people out of the clinic. They love it.
I think, though, it takes a certain kind of person who wants to have a certain kind of practice, especially if we're talking about psychologists and psychiatrists, because I think social workers and mental health nurses work in teams naturally. I was a nurse before, and maybe that's why I was attracted to that kind of work.
If you are very independent or you need to have all the control over your practice and you don't want somebody else going into your scheduler and booking in the assessments, then our mental health clinics are not for you. But I will tell you that for a while I told my psychiatrists and psychologists that as a way of learning from each other they were going to see patients together. They didn't like that, but then after a while they loved it so much I could hardly pry them apart anymore to see people separately.
Really I think the benefits for these people are that they get to work in wonderful teams. They get to really share the load of the patients. They learn from each other. It's not the same kind of piecework or fee-for-service type work. They can do other things and still get paid. A psychiatrist can be making a phone call to a patient. A psychiatrist can be seeing a family member, and they're going to get paid for whatever they do.