That is, in fact, an interesting question, because as you have identified, this was different from anything that the Canadian Armed Forces members had been asked to do before. There were obviously some unique challenges, such as how to deploy people within a pandemic environment and into a community that might be the same community that some of the people lived in. It was a very different patient population. As you know, our Canadian Armed Forces members are between the ages of 17 and 60, and those would be the types of patients that our care providers would be used to seeing. We're a fairly healthy population because we're screened and we do a lot of physical training. A fair amount of training went in, not just mental health training. There were about eight to ten different training modules preparing the members to go in and provide a very different type of care to a different population.
The specific role that I had with my team was to look at how to mentally prepare them to deal with some of the demands of caring for those patients, and also to take care of themselves and to look out for their buddies and the teams they were working with throughout what, at the time, was going to be a task of unknown duration.
A lot of focus was put on making sure that they were rotating through different tasks and that they weren't working overly long hours. There was also emphasis on teaching them as well as their leadership how to support each other within the small teams they were working in, as well as depending on the mental health support resources that we had put in place for them.