Julie Green

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the child and family services system has been through a complete overhaul since the second of the OAG reports was tabled in 2018. And we created the quality improvement plan that the Member referenced which is now in its in its last days. We are going to create a bridge plan which will move over both the completed and incomplete actions that came out of the quality improvement plan.

We also as as the Member knows, we are going to revise the Child and Family Services Act to align our legislation with the federal legislation that came into effect in...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wasn't the health minister at that time, and I did not make this commitment. It is my understanding there was a jurisdictional scan done and it has been it has been completed, that it is primarily about information sharing, which is a huge issue with respect to our path forward with child and family services and Indigenous governments. So it doesn't speak about the power or the role or the responsibility and so on of a child and youth advocate. That's not what it's about. It's about information sharing.

The focus that we have now is to work with...

Yes, thank you. Yes, I believe, Mr. Chair, that that is a safe assumption. One of one of the purposes of the senior strategy is to do a gap analysis and to come up with solutions to those gaps. So many of the priorities that are listed in this section of enabling seniors to age in place with dignity do represent gaps. So I would expect to see some version of them in the senior strategy when it's complete. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the community health nurses adhere to clinical practice guidelines for breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer. They will assess for symptoms and taking into account family history, age, risk factors, and other circumstances. And once again, this would be for screening.

So this is to not to make a diagnosis but to on a general basis, offer people the opportunity to be screened in or out of the risk of cancer based on their health indicators. Nurses are offered frequent professional development opportunities and we do have, as I mentioned previously, a...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, we treat Avens as one of our own, if you will, where we've provided them with additional funding to manage the stresses and strains of COVID. We're assisting them with evergreening their equipment and so on. So it's not a stretch to think that if their staff wanted training that we were providing that we would consider doing that. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I'd like to thank the Member for the question. Of course we're all the concerned about the high rates of cancer, including colorectal cancer, that occur in the NWT.

I want to make a distinction to start with between screening and diagnosis. We actually have a colorectal cancer screening committee, and they've recently started work in the Deh Cho by providing what are called FIT kits to households so that they can use that to provide a sample which would be screened for colorectal cancer. The health centres cannot provide diagnosis. The public health nurse, or...

Yes, thank you. So those are two different questions. So the first question is the answer is that the Department of Health and Social Services provides $100,000 a year to the NWT Seniors Society to do the elder abuse awareness and they're we're at a point where we're going to review the whether there is more that we can do to raise awareness and combat elder abuse. So that's the one thing.

There's one longterm care that is not government operated but it's operated by contract to the government. And so there is a quality assurance complaint process in place so that if family members had...

Yes, thank you. As I mentioned, and I'm happy to add some more detail, we advertised generally for Indigenous and community organizations to provide transitional housing. We heard back from the Hay River Committee for Persons with Disabilities, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the K'asho Got'ine Housing Society in Fort Good Hope, and the Salvation Army here in Yellowknife. So at this point, the department is working with each of these organizations to fund them to create a pilot project which would provide safe housing for people who are recovering from their addictions. Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as you know, one of the mandate commitments of this 19th Assembly is the need to strengthen addictions aftercare programming. And so with that in mind, we recognize that having a safe place to live is essential to achieving and maintaining sobriety, whatever the root cause of the addiction is. So from that point, we put out a call for proposals to Indigenous governments to ask them if they would be interested in creating a transitional housing model in their communities, with our money, and create a model for service for this kind of programming. And that...