Yes, we were having that discussion.
Again, CAF is a little bit different from veterans.
One of the things that came out in Riga, which we've all sort of known, is how high the risk is—for the whole year, but certainly within the first few days, the first week—of somebody presenting to an emergency department with a suicide attempt. The risk is 30 times or 40 times higher in that first period. One of the evidence-based things that came out of the U.K. is an empathic assessment, with hope and all of this stuff, in that short period afterwards. What we risk, as a CAF—and we've had a couple of suicides where people have gone to emergency—is because we don't run our own emergencies and they go into the civilian system, is whether the emergency doctor will necessarily call the doctor on the base, and what if the person says, “No, I'm fine,” and this kind of idea.
In small bases, in small communities, for example in Fredericton, where there's one main hospital, the Chalmers, we can go there; we can establish that relationship. Our own people sometimes work in the emergency. In larger centres it's harder. But we do need to look at that transition as one of the riskiest transitions, and we need to reach out. I know there are a whole bunch of things in the emergency room, reminders, but we need to have one of those reminders. I think the British national health system struggled for years trying to get a tick box on their record asking whether the person has ever served. If we can get emergency rooms to think about that, that should tweak people to the fact that if they're still serving, there's a whole bunch of people who care about them, who will look after them, not just their health, and if they're a veteran, there's OSISS and different things.
We had that discussion just today about reaching out more to the emergencies, whether that means buying people coffee, visiting, putting posters up. That's one of our really important things.