Good afternoon to everyone.
Thank you for this excellent presentation of the challenges of operational stress. Thank you for the fine testimony from Ms. Muise and Ms. Underhill. Thank you also for the explanations regarding the services.
I have a few questions on the same subject that Ms. Sgro raised previously.
Ms. Underhill, in your testimony, you said that it took you 10 years to realize that your spouse was suffering from operational stress.
With this in mind, do you believe that today—we were discussing 2001, now we are in 2009—your programs have succeeded in giving more information to the families and the close associates of someone who is returning from a war or from a military conflict? Have we succeeded in informing families better so that they can identify or detect a person suffering from operational stress syndrome?
Also, I know that services are often centralized in urban centres, and this always raises a question in my mind. Let us take the case of someone living in a rural environment, for instance, in a very isolated region, someone who has had to cope with operational stress syndrome problems for several years, someone who has returned from an armed conflict. If this person is far from the large centres, for instance Sainte-Anne Hospital near Montreal, how would they go about getting services? Also, are your interventions made with a view to cooperating with existing health and social service networks? Do you train responders on the ground so that they can deliver services in the near vicinity of such persons?
I have a further question. What do you expect from the committee and the government? Are there enough resources available to persons who have to cope with operational stress, for victims of operational stress? Should we have even more resources? Do we need more research on stress prevention—on the stress prevention services offered to these people—and do we need more information for caregivers, peers, etc.?