Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Providing aftercare and appropriate follow-up is an important step in the recovery process. There are, as I have already described, a number of options for aftercare support for individuals returning from addictions treatment. I won't list them again, for the sake of time. While there are some options in place, we need to ensure that our current range of aftercare and support options are keeping pace with the needs of people and the best and emerging practices.

The department is currently examining best practice research, jurisdictional and international scans, and local...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know that I'm not committee, and once again I really appreciate the work they did. It was a pleasure and honour to travel with them to these facilities to see firsthand some of the things that are going on, and I really appreciate the comments I heard.

To the Member from Kam Lake's comment, the Member talked about local options and the lack of a treatment facility. We may get to the point sometime in the Northwest Territories where there is a treatment facility. We don't know where that will be necessarily, but what we heard clearly from people during the Ministers'...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate the Member's comments. It's clearly recognized that housing is a barrier for many residents in the Northwest Territories and is reflected in the need to holistically address the social determinants of health as well as the historic cultural and systemic contributions to these issues in our territory. Collaboration and strong partnerships where all social envelope departments as well as external partners are at the table will be required to successfully take on this challenge. It is important to recognize that each situation is unique and that self...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I was hoping to have a response to each of the recommendations as we are going through the motion, so I won't go into too much detail here, other than to sort of articulate as best I can what the process is today, not necessarily where we need to go.

If an individual in the Northwest Territories is seeking support through a facility-based treatment centre, we go through a referral process and expedite it. We get the person in there. Before they even go down, they are required to have a follow-up appointment booked in their community or wherever their referral came from. If...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank the committee for their report and the hard work they put into it. I was, I think, honoured and privileged to join them in their tour of the treatment facilities. I really appreciated that opportunity.

Overall, I just want to be clear that we are very supportive of the recommendations provided by committee. The department is in favour of them and is planning to include three of the four recommendations in the addictions recovery action plan. We are not planning to include the section on the 120-day report, but all the other three recommendations, we...

No.

I understand that the committee just had a review of the information Privacy Commissioner's report. There were a number of recommendations.

I am looking forward to, once again, hearing back from committee by way of letter or other correspondence indicating the types of things they want to know. If this is included in there, I will absolutely provide that information. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You're just one person.

When the rights and principles of the Health Information Act are shared with patients, they are supposed to be told that they can request to stop their information from being shared with certain practitioners. If they make that request, we do our best to make sure that happens. I can't say that every resident who has approached that understands that, which is why we are trying to improve our training; so that people can understand that.

This is new legislation. We are open to making improvements as we go. The Privacy Commissioner for the Northwest Territories has made a number of...

What we are referring to is allowing a patient to block certain practitioners from seeing their information so that not everybody who is in the circle of care can necessarily see the information. That work is under way. We are still trying to figure out the exact magnitude, the cost of it. There are some challenges with it. For instance, if somebody chooses to block something today, and then 10, 15, years from now their situation changes and there is a critical incident and somebody needs to look at that information, if it's blocked, it could adversely affect their care. So we want to make...

No, we are moving to the electronic medical record system in the Northwest Territories, so it's going to be one system where we can have patient information, they can see what their test results are, all of those types of things. There are three communities that do not have that system in place yet. We are still rolling it out in the Northwest Territories, but we intend to have it everywhere in the Northwest Territories.