Glen Abernethy

We will be putting in and developing an evaluation framework around this particular model to see how it’s working, to make sure it’s meeting the needs of our residents, patients and professionals in the individual communities. I’ve said it before and I’d love to say it again, I’d love to invite committee out to see staff and see the operations once we get it up and running. I ask for a couple of months, but then I’d love to invite the Social Programs committee out there to see the operations up and running. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Department of Health and Social Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of MACA are working together on a ground and highway rescue strategy. This particular EMR response tool is with respect to direct contact out of health centres to the regional centres, and we can coordinate things like medevacs out of there, but they will be going to the communities where there are airports as coordinated by the on-site people, the coordinator in the EMR office and a dispatcher in the EMR office. It will not be dispatching airplanes or helicopters to highway situations.

Before any decisions are made, we do need to understand the caseload, the client load, and the individuals that may be able to be repatriated. I intend to share that information with committee and we can have a discussion on what might be the most appropriate location and how we, as an Assembly, decide where we want to invest our dollars, remembering that we want to keep people as close to home if we can find a way, and we have residents from all over the Territories, so there might be multiple opportunities here.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I actually can’t remember the exact number of clients that we had in there. I actually just talked about it a couple of days ago when we were having our budget dialogue, but it is about 100 adults and about 100 youth, give or take. We know it’s incredibly expensive. During the last round of supps, I asked for $2.5 million for youth and another I think it was $2.5 million or $2.6 million for adults. So there is a significant cost. There’s multi-millions of dollars a year.

I take the Member’s point from her statement where we need to dig into these files and review them...

Yes, please, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document, entitled “NWT Anti-Poverty Roundtable Final Report, November 28-29, 2013, Detah, Northwest Territories.”

These dollars are intended to provide 24/7 coverage in the office for our staff who will be providing the services. The significant difference and benefits for residents of the Northwest Territories – and our focus is on the people, the clients and our residents – is when somebody is injured in a community and they are in the health centre and they need immediate response, immediate action or immediate medevac, the community health worker or the community health care professional in that community will be able to call one office and that office will give them links to physicians or specialists...

Mr. Speaker, a significant amount of research has been done on this particular file. It started off with a different name many years ago, the Territorial Support Network. We’ve had physicians from across the North and we’ve had some real strong champions for this particular approach, and we have looked at other jurisdictions. This is going to give the community health care workers in the communities one point of contact for all medical emergencies, medevacs, all of those types of situations as opposed to what we’ve experienced in the past where every authority had their own plan, their own...

My initial discussions with the department, we’re looking for a similar type case where we have individuals with similar needs, but we do know right now that there’s a huge variety of residents in the Northwest Territories. We have some residents who require 24/7 care with multiple individuals and others that are more in the independent setting, but require significant medical supports. So at this time I’m not prepared to say that we have found a catchment, a group of individuals who have similar challenges that we may be able to repatriate up here, but I have directed the department to do a...

The resident who happens to be utilizing the services would have to work with the practitioner and then we would follow the normal medical travel process with respect to the exception request.

If a resident comes to Yellowknife, happens to get sick and is admitted to the hospital and then has to be transferred to another hospital in their home community, they would actually be covered. It’s when the individual is discharged or free to go where this is a situation. The resident would have to work through their practitioner and follow the normal medical travel process. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.