There has not been any reduction to the clinical care programming or the non-insured benefit for medical transportation, which were the two elements in the scope for this audit. In fact, we have had reinvestment in 2012-13 into clinical care because the costs were getting higher mainly due to the fact that we had a high turnover, a high dependency on agency nurses. We are still using a lot of agency nurses to compensate for the fact that we have vacancies in the branch for these services. So, no, instead of a reduction, there has been additional investment to meet the increased costs.
If I could add to this, we are really hopeful that our investment in retention and recruitment will allow us to use some of these resources that currently go to agencies to improve services in the communities as well, because it's a very costly model to rely on agency nurses to complement our staffing in the nursing station.
This is something we are really hopeful we can do better with the money because I know the public accounts committee is pretty concerned about efficiencies as well. There is a potential there to change the model of business to reinvest the resources that currently we spend on agency nurses in the clinical care program, in enhancing our services.