Riadh Zine: Thank you. No problem. Thank you, Rishi. And as always, thank you for your questions. I think it’s obviously all related. So, I will actually answer all these questions. I think you had a question on the drivers, you had the question on the availability of labor, the cost of labor. And also, I think the other question you had is on the utilization. So, on the drivers for the first time in the beginning of the year, we hired drivers and open positions that were open for significant time period in excess of 12 months. So, we €“ so that’s really a good sign I think in the labor side. So, I mean for us, being able to do that obviously increases our opportunity to generate more revenues. On the availability of labor, obviously, the reason we start to see the organic growth back, it’s not because demand is back.
Demand was always there. So, the reason we start to see organic growth again in the business in the beginning of this year is because actually our labor €“ our access to labor is much better, meaning what, meaning some of the contracted labor that kind of left the business in the second half of the year and it was referred to as in healthcare as the great resignation is coming back. It’s coming back full time in our business. And some of those signs that €“ we start to see some of those signs and which actually does two things. Allows you to do more procedures and satisfy that demand that you could in service in the second half of last year. But also the other thing it does, it helps you by having lower cost as well. So, in the second half of last year, it wasn’t even just the cost.
The costs went up. And I think you heard that a lot from many healthcare services. But it wasn’t a cost. The cost was actually a theoretical cost because the labor was not there. So, even if we were actually happy to pay that cost, the availability was not there. That’s why the same-stores went down for MRI from the 5% range in the first half to pretty much nothing to zero in the second half of the year. Now, that has early signs again, like it’s still early in the year, but the early signs show that, that story of not finding labor at all is behind us or has eased in a significant way. Let’s actually put it in a conservative way. The worst is behind us. I think those €“ that’s what I said in my comments earlier today. The worst is definitely behind us.
That is a factual statement. Now, we will see if that continues throughout the year, which so far shows that that’s the case. You had another question on capacity, capacity and utilization. So, our utilization as you know, as you increase, as you have same-stores and labor is available. Obviously, your utilization of the assets will get better. And that’s important because there is a limit to how much you could adjust as your cost base for peak hours, right. It’s not exactly one-to-one, right. There is a certain minimum of peak hours that you need in the clinics. So, that is improving. And if it continues to improve in certain clinics, every region is different. Every market is different. But our response has always been add operating hours if you kind of €“ things are really back to normal, and we start to see capacity being used, then we just extend the hours of operations to extend that capacity and kind of more demand available to us in certain markets.
