Julie Green

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Thank you for the question, Member for Nunakput. I recognize that this is a terrible time to be facing a serious illness where it's necessary to travel outside of your community and outside of the territory on a regular basis for treatment, and I certainly do empathize with the people who are doing that and recognize that, in fact, this travel is a burden. Thank you.

There is a testing unit called Panbio that will be in place in every health centre by the end of October. It will provide rapid testing in the sense that it can be used at point of care and generate a result right then and there. It is a very simple-to-use machine; it is not only available to highly trained medical professionals. The thing is that, if somebody is not symptomatic, these machines are not necessarily the things that they need most. There is sort of a sequence of events. There can be a screening test: do you have COVID now? However, there need to be follow-up tests through the...

It's my understanding that the Chief Public Health Officer looks at these cases on a case-by-case basis. There is no blanket exemption policy in place for people who have regular medical travel. Having said that, I recognize that this is a hardship, and I encourage the medical travellers to be in touch with ProtectNWT to see whether they can obtain an exemption for more than one trip so that they have some certainty going forward about where they're going to stay.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise today to pay tribute to my friend, mentor, and collaborator, Lyda Fuller. Ms. Fuller is retiring at the end of this month, after a 35-year career with the YWCA, 23 of those years in Yellowknife. Ms. Fuller is originally from Baltimore, Maryland. After she finished her master's degree at Johns Hopkins University, she worked with vulnerable populations there. On a camping trip to Ontario with a friend, she met her future husband, Ron, and eventually married him and moved to the YWCA in St. Thomas to work as director of community development. While there, she...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you for the question. Mr. Speaker, what the Department of Health and Social Services is doing early next year is to survey people who have received treatment in addictions centres to understand directly from them, the people who have used these centres, about the successes and shortcomings of their experience. I am very interested in seeing that information. What I remember from our tour that you were on, as well, Mr. Speaker, as a member of the social development committee, is there was quite a gap between what was being said by people in the NWT and what was...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you to the Member for Hay River South for that question. There is a public health order in place for the building based on the risk of exposure to asbestos and mould, among other things. The CPHO has been working diligently with the owner this month to understand the level of contamination and remediation that has taken place and what needs to take place in the future. The most recent development is that the CPHO has hired a consultant to verify and augment the reports that she has received from the contractor for the owner, and this work will be done on an...

I do make a commitment to look into what is going on with the meals. Thanks.

The medical travel policies were revised last year, at the end of the 18th Assembly, and one of the new features is an appeal mechanism so that, if someone is denied an escort, then it is possible for that person to fill in an appeal form and file that with medical travel and have it considered. The only hitch to these, though, and I get lots of these crossing my desk, is that people need to plan ahead. Medical-travel people work a regular day. There is an on-call function, but I find they get a lot of last-minute requests. If the person who requires an escort is denied, there is an appeal...

The answer to the question is that the on-the-land healing fund was increased by $700,000 for this fiscal year, and so the total now is $1.8 million. Thank you.

It's worth remembering always that a decision to go into treatment is a voluntary decision. People may feel that they are ready at one point and then later feel that they, in fact, are not ready. I know that, with respect to COVID, I have heard from medical patients. They are somewhat reluctant to go South to the Alberta hospitals, for example, because there have been hospital-based outbreaks, and there is a perception of increased risk. I would not be at all surprised if that is the case with people who are looking at treatment programs. I would also say, and the Member has heard me say this...