That was nice of you, thank you.
For 14 years I served as the psychiatric director of the program at CHEO. Two years ago we were faced with a one-year waiting list, which is completely unacceptable, given the severe medical and psychological complications of eating disorders in young people.
Out of desperation, given that you can't have a one-year waiting list for such sick kids, we just decided to close the program and all those one-year referrals on the waiting list were all sent back to their poor family doctors.
We went through what's called a “lean review” to try to figure out what we were going to cut in order to be more efficient. We're not going to take mild or moderate referrals to our program anymore, even though there's nobody out in the community who will do it. Even though it takes two years for these kids to recover, we're only going to offer them nine months of therapy.
We had to cut all of the therapy groups from our in-patient program in order to try to move some of our in-patient therapists to be able to provide the outpatient family therapy because we didn't have an outpatient team.