Right. Yes.
The maintenance and clinical skills program is something we actually first came up with in the late 1990s when we realized that just working in your office didn't cut it to get you ready to go to Afghanistan and see the kinds of patients we're seeing there. We thought we needed to take military providers out of that kind of garrison-based very routine setting and challenge them more clinically. That's also a cost driver, by the way, because the goal is that roughly 20% of a unit's foreign physicians' time is spent doing that, so that makes them less available to provide direct patient care.
During the time since we conceived the program--and now on average we are about 35% short of military physicians across the board, so we don't have enough uniformed bodies to really make the program work the way it was intended to--we have focused on identifying those people who are coming to deployment in the next year or so and pulling out all the stops we can to make sure that they get brought up to speed in time for their deployment. That has resulted in relatively less effort for those who stay behind.
We are making headway with our uniformed medical officer recruiting. We expect to be up to full strength within about a year and a half, and after that I hope we can do much better at meeting the targets of the maintenance and clinical skills program.