Thank you for that question. It's a good question.
We don't have a direct number that we've been forecasting in terms of the number of clients who would specifically have these occupational stress conditions. What I can tell you, and I think it is important to think about, is that the number of clients we've received who are going through our disability award process has decreased dramatically since we brought in the new Veterans Charter. We had forecast, in this year, that about 5,000 clients would go through our disability award program, and the number is dramatically less than that. I can't tell you exactly what it is off the top of my head.
That is indicative, I think, of what we've accomplished under the new charter in the sense that people are now coming in for rehabilitation and treatment as opposed to focusing purely on the financial benefit that was available and which is still is available under the disability pension and now the disability award. In fact, the number of people who are coming through the rehab gateway is bang on the number we had forecast, and that number is somewhere in the order of 2,000.
So although the tempo of operational stress injuries has increased dramatically as a result of deployments like Afghanistan, it is similar enough in nature to have client numbers that are pretty much along the lines of what we had forecast at the time of going forward with the new Veterans Charter.
I sense that we'll be much better equipped to deal with people suffering from occupational stress injuries as a result of the recent announcement under the budget of about $9 million to be dedicated to the establishment of new occupational stress injury clinics across the country and another $13.7 million to help the department deal with clients who are suffering from mental health and in fact physical health conditions.
More specifically, the casualties we're experiencing in Afghanistan, and in particular the number of people who have died in Afghanistan, have been dramatically higher than what anyone would have projected. I don't want to downplay that in any way. But there certainly is enough capacity in our forecast to deal with the financial aspects associated with that. We have in fact been tooling up to deal with people who are suffering from mental and physical problems related to those deployments.