The Integrated Personnel Support Centres began to be established about two years ago. As the military would say, “We stood them up very quickly”. It was a commitment, and we moved very rapidly to do it. We gradually added employees to those locations. At this point, I can say that we have a stable workforce of about 100 on those bases.
You're asking how we would know if we're doing a good job. We do various things to measure that. In Charlottetown, we review files that would examine a real case and ask how this worked. We would ask if they got timely assistance and what kind of assistance they got.
We do know that over 1,000 members are getting service directly every month on these sites. That number is increasing. We're keeping stronger statistics around that, because we want to make sure that if we need to, we'll put more Veterans Affairs Canada employees there.
So we have different measurement systems. We measure every element of our case managers' workload. We have a commitment to ensure they have no more than 40 cases, which is seen as an industry norm, and that's for complex cases. We measure what type of complexity these cases reflect. As I say, we have a standard of 40, and our national average is well below that. It's just over 30 per case manager. We think we're getting certain things right.