Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Travel outside of the Northwest Territories within Canada and outside of Canada is certainly different. The NWT Health Care Plan does cover residents for medically necessary hospital and medical expenses when residents are travelling outside the Northwest Territories and we have reciprocal billing agreements with the different provinces, which actually articulate or dictate what those costs that we’re covering are. We do have an agreement with most of the provinces and territories to direct bill the Department of Health and Social Services for doctor visits and hospital...

Thank you. The Member is correct. I mean, as we move forward with system transformation, we are doing that work and that work does take into consideration population, but it also takes into consideration the demands, as well, because not every situation has the same demands. A home support worker in a community could have a multiple number of clients and some of them could be simple with maybe a visit a week. Others are going to take a significant amount of work. The demand will change in communities as the needs of our patients change over time. So, we need to be able to be flexible with that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, there are some updates. In October 2014 we made a commitment to evaluate the palliative care needs in Deline. I do apologize to the Member; the Member asked the question yesterday and my response wasn’t as clear as I had hoped it would be and I added some additional confusion. I do apologize to the Member for the frustration there. But, yes, we are moving forward with palliative care needs in Deline. We do intend to have staff come in in 2015-2016 to visit the community to assess the existing infrastructure and evaluate the applicability. The assessment is...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is actually the first year that we’ve actually started to see some impact in this particular area. The budgets have always been sufficient. We are starting to see some real pressure, but in order to make a forced growth submission we actually have to have some statistics showing the actual increase of costs over a little bit of time, but until this year we haven’t had those challenges. We’re starting to see it now, so we’re going to make a forced growth case for it.

The nurses that are located in the psych unit as well as in the emergency unit are trained in non-violent crisis intervention. There are a couple different parts to non-violent crisis intervention, but all the nurses that are in those units, from what I understand from Stanton, they have actually received the training. There are also refreshers on a regular basis. There’s a second level of training, and we’re actually working with the security providers in Stanton right now as well as the others to get some of our people, including some of the security staff into the second level of the NVCI...

Thanks. The Member is exactly right. There are increasing numbers of seniors in the Northwest Territories and we are actually projecting increased costs to our already existing budget but we’re in the process of trying to monitor that and figure out what those costs are so that we can project them effectively given that we have a growing population. I imagine at some point, once we get a better grasp of what those future costs are going to be, we will be coming back to the FMB as well as to committee.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. Just to go back in time, there was never any money budgeted for midwifery services. Yellowknife Health and Social Services chose to re-profile some of their internal funding and they created a Midwifery Program that was only funded for one position. I don’t believe one position makes a midwifery program. In fact, I would suggest it would be dangerous for the incumbent to have a one-incumbent-based midwifery program because they would get burnt out.

In the proposed design in the midwifery report it suggests that for a territorial program based out of Yellowknife there would...

Just going back to the first part of the comment before the question, the $4.3 million estimate was based on the numbers obtained from the NWT Bureau of Statistics by the Supplementary Health Benefits Working Group in 2010, and it’s been updated for new information. But $4.3 million is the estimate, which, as a note, is a significant amount of money in these fiscally challenging times. I do believe, and I think many Members believe, that this is an area that needs some work, and I would like to see that work done, which is why I’d like to make it a priority for the transition document.

With...

Mr. Chair, it has taken a while to recruit, while we’re still proving to be unsuccessful in Fort Smith and we continue to move there.

We can’t recruit midwives in Yellowknife without job descriptions. Given that it’s going to be a territorial model and the midwives are going to have some responsibility not just in Yellowknife but on a territorial level, it is going to require different job descriptions because the scope of work is going to be different. We need to have job descriptions. We need to outline and clarify what that scope of work is going to be and how it’s going to work so we can...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Medical physicians, family practitioners are actually trained to provide this assessment, as well, so if they’re working with somebody who’s in a medical detox and it’s determined that the person is now fit and they have concluded their medical detox, they can choose to discharge them or offer them other options that might be appropriate for them given their current situation. If they think the person has some psychiatric problems, they can refer them to a psychiatrist.

There are two positons at Stanton by way of example, but we’ve also got distant psychiatry and a...