Pito Chickering: Hey guys. Thanks for taking the questions. A couple of questions on the hospital side just for — just some number of questions. Can you quantify the nurse-to-patient ratio you guys had in back office 2022? And how do you think about that for 2023. On the same topic, can you quantify the turnover you saw in the back half of 2022? And any details around nurse recruiting and how it’s tracking versus your expectations?
Saum Sutaria: Hey, Pito it’s Saum. We don’t report our nurse-to-patient ratio. They’re different state-to-state and some states have regulations and others don’t. And it really depends heavily on the acuity. I’m not even sure how in an aggregated way one could describe a nurse-to-patient ratio given the differences in ICU, MedSurg, Forest , Telly, et cetera and we don’t plan on reporting on that. The second part of your question, it’s important obviously I took the time to mention it and I appreciate you’re highlighting it. We’re very focused on our nurse, but also tech and other important clinical role recruiting and that’s been going very well. As I’ve indicated, our hiring was up on employed staff in 2022 over 2021 and that’s accelerating.
But at the same time, importantly, because of the investments we’ve made in the workforce, our turnover rates have come down, which is important from a retention perspective. And I think, you could legitimately attribute those reductions to the investments we’ve made stabilization of the operating environment, coming out of the pandemic surges, the recurrent surges and also probably a somewhat less desire for nurses to continue on the pace at which many of them are choosing to travel for other assignments. And I think as all of those things help to stabilize the workforce environment in 2023. As Dan noted, we hope to make further reductions in our reliance on contract labor and expect that to moderate through the year. So, it is a very important agenda item as we look forward.
I would tell you, one last piece of color on this that, over the past couple of years, I had mentioned a few times, that we have built a lot of relationships at the ground level with nursing schools. And our ability right now to bring on new graduates into our environment, it’s better than I’ve seen in a long time and that’s helping. Those investments in relationships that we made over that time, I think will serve us well in 2023.
Pito Chickering: Great. Thanks, so much.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brian Tanquilut with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.
Brian Tanquilut: Hey good morning, guys. Dan thanks for the color on your capital deployment views. But maybe just thinking about the buyback announcement from last quarter and your views on debt pay down as well. Where do you think the right leverage ratio is, or have you set leverage targets? And maybe just to clarify, as we think about buybacks, curious as to your thought or philosophy on using debt at some point to buy back stock, or are we avoiding that altogether? Just want to clarify all these things. Thanks.
Dan Cancelmi: Yes. In terms of leverage, we’ve obviously made substantial progress over the past four or five years. If you go back to 2017, we were north of six times and we brought it down to approximately four times since then. Reducing leverage is obviously a very important focus of ours. As we make all capital decisions, we take into consideration, what’s it going to mean to our margins, what’s it going to mean to our free cash flow generation, what’s ultimately going to mean to our leverage. So, it’s top of mind always. And we’ll continue to look for opportunities to reduce leverage in the future. In terms of the mix of debt retirement versus share repurchases, as I mentioned in my remarks, we have four key priorities.
