Sure. Thanks very much for that.
Right from when the pandemic hit on March 13 last year the department went to a remote working environment. I'm pleased to say that within a month we were back up to over 90% effective; that is, people had the right IT equipment and secure access.
Automatically we started to reach out to vulnerable veterans, those who we believed were on the verge of homelessness and veterans who were in long-term care, and we linked with their families. We reached out to women veterans, indigenous veterans and anyone with an illness or ailment that, as deemed by our folks, made them vulnerable, including case-managed veterans.
We continue to provide service daily. We receive about 1,600 phone calls a day and hundreds of texts a day. It is interesting that in some areas, like our phone service, we actually became more efficient in answering calls, certainly within the two-minute standard. We started piloting the use of tools such as this and Microsoft Teams to do virtual meetings with veterans. Our mental health supports went virtual almost immediately. We are very proud of the operational stress injury clinics and our clinicians across the country.
At the same time, for cases in which our veterans were in very difficult palliative or frail circumstances, we still had employees who did home visits, occupational therapists and other professionals, in order to ensure seamlessness in support. We created a COVID-19 working group with veteran stakeholders so that we could hear from them and see ways and means whereby we could improve what we were doing. We continue to learn, having these meetings on a regular basis across the board. The fact that we were able to hire over 350 employees and train them during this environment in a virtual workspace was commendable for the team.
I will stop there, sir.