Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Hay River Health and Social Services Authority is actually outside of the public service, so the employees and the management in that authority are not GNWT employees in any capacity. We do provide funding to them as we do with other authorities. I believe it was in 2005 I pushed to bring the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority into the public service and the price tag at that time was about $2 million to bring in the pensions and whatnot. We continue to have discussions with the authority. We continue to explore possibilities to bring them in. The price...

Yes, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The dollars identified here are the dollars that are provided to the authorities to provide services in regions and communities.

Arrangements for travel are made through the medical travel Stanton office. The Stanton Territorial Hospital and the Department of Health and Social Services pays for travel and accommodation costs for when individuals are going out for treatment referred by the government. Currently, the medical travel office has put in place guidelines that denies travel assistance home when an individual leaves treatment early. If they complete their training they would be covered. This was only recently brought to the department’s attention, and I have directed the department to ensure that this guideline...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’re just pulling out the exact details. We have it. It’s on one of my sheets here, I know that. But to start off, we have the $650,000 that was identified on the previous page, 8-14, that I already answered Mr. Bromley on. We’ve got some money in for a senior advisor position, which is $163,000. We’ve got money in for the anti-poverty roundtable meetings, research and communications. This is the development and working towards the development of the territorial action plan, $60,000. I actually have a sheet that has all this on it, I just don’t know where it is. Can we...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We do prefer to keep our residents in the Northwest Territories and we do have a territorial bed management program that helps us, where possible, keep our residents here in the Northwest Territories. We continue to use services in the South – MRIs, other things – and where load is there, we will send our residents south for programming, but we do our best to keep everybody in the North as much as possible. We don’t offer every service that’s offered in the South, so from time to time our residents do have to go down.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We do have a health and human resource strategic planning unit with the Department of Health and Social Services and the exact things that the Member was talking about are the types of things we’re trying to do. The Member is correct; we do have a large number of positions that are or do require statutory appointments, and we would have to staff for those accordingly. But at the same time, we have been very supportive of training local people for local jobs. The resident care aide program that is delivered by the college, we have worked with them to have those delivered...

According to the territorial plan, Hay River, Inuvik, Yellowknife as a territorial program.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I and the Department of Health and Social Services are clearly supporters of the concept of a wellness court and Health and Social Services has been an active supporter of the concept of a wellness court and it remains a priority as we move forward, and it’s also important to helping address things like the addictions and mental health in the Northwest Territories. The role of the health and social services system is to ensure that mental health services are available. With respect to the wellness court, which will give confidence to the judiciary in the effectiveness of...

The professionals we have in our system who are working with our residents are aware, for the most part, of the types of services and programming that are offered in each of the different facilities in the South. They do share that information with the residents before they go off for treatment.

On a few other points, we do work with our residents before they go down to make sure they have follow-up appointments back in the North, so when they do come back we can work with them to customize after-care. So we do have discussions with them before they go down and we do help them understand the...