Yes, just to add to that, a huge, significant issue right now is access to primary care providers and family physicians. Again, I was working.... I'm doing outreach in the shelters. Our psychiatric outreach team is a team of 10 staff—seven nurses and three social workers—and we have psychiatrists we consult with. We were able to go into the shelters and allow people to get psychiatric assessments right away without a family provider. However, to access the majority of our services at the Royal, you need a family physician, and you need somebody who's going to be willing to follow you up. Accessing a walk-in clinic is not going to be adequate; you need a primary care provider.
Where we've had good success is with nurse practitioners who are trained; there are great community health centres and family health care teams. Then, also, we need to educate our family physicians and ensure that it's in the medical syllabus that substance use and mental health care are a standard part of the training so they feel competent when they're providing that care.
One of the things we've looked at with our perinatal health care programming at the Ottawa Hospital is a program where we can provide psychiatric consultation directly to primary care providers. If primary care providers are empowered to provide mental health care, people may not need to come to places like the Royal, and we can reduce wait times. That's the other piece.
If you're looking at mild to moderate mental illness, you can be supported and symptoms can be ameliorated with peer support and with psychotherapy. If we can have access to free psychotherapy, which we do not currently have on a national level, that could go a long way. The Ontario structured psychotherapy program has been wildly successful.
I have one last piece: The regional, coordinated access through AccessMHA has also been wildly successful.