Thank you for the question.
Just to give you a sense of context, we employ 862 nurses within Indigenous Services Canada. In addition to that, at this moment in time we have approximately 600 nurses and paramedics on our roster of contracted nurses. We use that roster in order to fill surge and even in order to fill the requirements within communities. It's very much a mix of Indigenous Services Canada personnel plus surge contractors.
How do we get those? We definitely do work with the province. In fact, as you can imagine, during the COVID-19 pandemic health human resources was a challenge across the country. Therefore, we sometimes had to compete for that health human resource capacity. We had to think about what some of the creative ways were we could attract and retain. We worked with colleges and universities and with first nations-led institutions like SIIT to try to get that health human resource capacity in indigenous communities.
I can speak to efforts going into the future, but definitely at this point we relied on ISC nursing staff and contract staff, and then used different ways to advertise and look for skills. Even within our own group, we have nursing staff who are in communities. We also have nursing staff within the department who are doing policy work. We look at our own workforce. We look at the retired workforce. Could we bring people back to be on contract with us, even if part time?
The last thing I would say is that we also instituted ISC CARE, which was turned around in about two weeks. It was a safe air transport that actually moved people from communities and that facilitated, safely, the arrival of our HHR personnel. We were able to fly over 5,400 health human resources in and out of those 51 communities.