To start with the utilization, we are underpopulated as midwives to service the demand, in fact, and about 40% of people in Ontario who wish to have the services of a midwife don't get the services of a midwife. Those are the numbers that the Association of Ontario Midwives put forth. Out of every 10 women who ask for midwifery services, six get it and four do not.
I can speak to my own practice. We have 90 women on a wait-list for the months of July and August alone for our little practice. That's 90 women who will not get the services they're requesting as a consequence of the lack of availability of care providers. Now, that's not a consistent demand around the calendar.
Normally, we do have wait-lists, but the only way that we're going to grow midwifery, address those wait-lists and address those four out of every 10 people who are seeking midwifery and don't get the care is to have a program that, one, is situated around the province—not focused in the GTA—and that, secondly, permits graduates to maintain at the same level we have or at an expanded level.
As has previously been said, right now what limits our capacity to grow is the availability of preceptors: those midwives and graduates who supervise the learners. We do have some self-imposed limits. That's why only a hundred students are taken in across the consortium each year. However, we had just started to address unique ways of expanding this, such as, for example, not recognizing provincial borders for students who are coming from other provinces, because Laurentian really was educating the country, not just Ontario.
As was previously said, all the midwives in New Brunswick graduated from Laurentian. We regularly take in students from the Northwest Territories, from the Yukon and from all across the country, because there were only six schools of midwifery. Now there are five.