I have two case managers. I have a Veterans Affairs case manager and I also have a DND case manager. My case manager in Calgary, Mimi Fortin, is a retired lieutenant-colonel from Canadian Forces. She handles things like whenever I need new legs and things like that, helping to get the ball rolling on that because there is, again, a whole bunch of hoops that have to be jumped through. It's been fairly difficult for me to get anything delivered in a timely fashion just because of the amount of hoops, just because the dollar figure is quite large for prosthetics. The system has gotten better for me in Calgary just because there's more familiarity with what needs to be done and things like that.
I have not had the opportunity to talk much to my Veterans Affairs case manager. One of the biggest problems I had was with the veterans independence program. This was originally covered by Veterans Affairs. Then it was dropped for serving members and it was covered by the military. It took me over two years to get the veterans independence program in place after qualifying for it.
The main problem was, when you ask for it, you're essentially given a phone book of people to call who can “deliver the service”. I think I called 15 different service providers who said they did not provide the service. A lot of members get fed up with this. They get frustrated and they give up.
I would have liked to see my case manager take a little more proactive role and kind of say, “Hey, here's a company that we're already doing business with. Here's their number. I'll link up the contact.” rather than the onus being on the member because it's frustrating; you're in a new life. I was in a wheelchair, I couldn't walk a whole lot, and it was pretty hard because I put on my brave face every day and it was really tough to see my family members look at me with really sad faces, and the fact that I had to go through this binder to contact service providers who had no idea what I was talking about....
Every time I brought it up to my Veterans Affairs case manager, they just provided with me with a brand new updated list, and I just kept running into the same problem over and over again. One thing I would look at is streamlining that system, absolutely.