As the deputy said, we've had an incredible increase in the number of applications. Hiring new people takes a long time, just as the hiring process in the public service can be lengthy at times. It take a long time to find the people in certain areas depending on the labour market. Some of these jobs require very specific skills, such as nursing. Then, as the deputy mentioned, we take time training them.
From the time the decision to hire is made through to the staffing and training can sometimes take most of a year to get people up and running and see an impact. I should underline that just throwing human resources at this is not the only answer. One of the things that having these resources has allowed us to do is deal with the influx. At the same time we will look at how we're going to change the way we do things.
Over the past few years we've been doing a number of things. Some of it changes the process, . Some of it is using technology. One of the things we noticed in the department is that a lot of time is spent in the hand-offs, so we've reduced the number of hand-offs, and got the people on the same team who have the expertise to make those decisions quickly.
Some of the other things we're doing are around technology, such as using artificial intelligence to identify the audiograms in some of these files. It's a very specific kind of document, and we can use technology to identify them, so staff don't have to search the files. We are at the very early stages of this.
We use links to get some of the information we need—links into the Canadian Forces health information system, where we have limited access—to take a look at the kind of medical information we need to make these decisions.
A number of these initiatives are under way. If we did not have these kinds of resources, the number of people waiting over the 16 weeks would be much higher.