Julie Green

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The nurses in the health centres don't make house calls. Thank you.

Thank you for that question. It is a priority of this government to help elders to age in place, and there are many things that need to be lined up in order to make that mandate commitment a reality. One is housing, that people have housing that is suitable and affordable for them to live in. The second is that we have a robust home and community care program that can visit more able adults in their homes and provide them with personal support worker services. That could be things like driving the elder to an appointment. It could be cleaning their oven. It could be taking them grocery...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am going to take that question on notice as I do not have any specific information about the condition of the Fort Providence health centre. Thank you.

I appreciate that the Member was able to give me this question in advance because there is quite a detailed answer to provide. The Department of Health and Social Services operates the NWT helpline. It's available 24/7, and that could be for counseling. It could be for referral. There are a number of different functions. The helpline calls are anonymous, so people choose how much information to disclose, such as their ethnicity, their age, the community of origin and so on.

However, I can tell you that, in 2019, there were 697 calls to the helpline; 46 percent identified as female; 52 percent...

The situation in communities without homecare is that the community health nurse is the person who provides the homecare in default. The allocation of resources is really dependent on the number of clients and the types of needs they have, so the allocation of homecare services is something that the department is working on. Depending on the age profile and need profile of people in your community, it may be necessary to assign additional resources, but I can't make that commitment today. Thank you.

Thank you for that question. It's not the role of Health and Social Services to provide ambulance services. That's under the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs. I am assuming that community members drive one another to the health centre. That's probably the most common practice, and I hope that that would still be the practice. In the event that somebody doesn't have a ride close to hand, that person should call 911 and ask them for help to get to the health centre.

I take that comment.

Long-term care facilities are for people who need complex medical care from nurses 24 hours a day. They are people who have needs that are beyond families to provide. As a result of the level of care required, these facilities are located in regional centres, and that is a place where there is a broader range of services available and also a greater number of staff who can work with the elders. I realize it's important to keep elders in their communities, but I also realize that, in order to provide them with the care they need for their own quality of life, it may not be possible to do that...

Thank you to the Member for Hay River South. Every two years, the department conducts a satisfaction survey related to the Community Counselling Program, and it looks at a lot of different things: cultural safety, respect, access, how effective the services were. We have discovered, as you said, that people do like face-to-face services, but what we really had as an overarching message from the last survey is that there is no "one size fits all." Some younger people prefer the phone apps; others prefer face-to-face encounters; and others are content to be on the telephone. What I want you to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for the question. I realize that it's very difficult for families to come to terms with deaths due to addictions, especially in young people, and it happens much too often. For the 18-to-30 group, they would have access to all the same resources that adults have. Those include things such as counselling, the opportunity to go to facility-based addictions, the opportunity to come back and use on-the-land services, and other kinds of peer supports. There is a full range of services outlined in the Mental Wellness and Addictions Recovery Action Plan, that was...