Sandy Lee

I tabled in the House about three weeks ago satisfaction surveys from residents all over the Territories about the services they’re receiving in health centres and hospitals. Over 80 percent of people say they are satisfied with the services they have. It is wrong... I understand the Member would like to have a resident nurse in Tsiigehtchic. A lot of our services, even in bigger communities, are by referral services. We’re not able to have resident doctors, resident nurses, resident radiologists, resident everything in every community. We do spend $326 million for 40,000 people scattered in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With respect, the information that the Member just read should be read together with other information that we have provided. The information on nurses-in-charge, we know that we’ve had at least 36 weeks of nursing coverage in Tsiigehtchic for a community of 170 people. The Member knows that I am committed to enhancing nursing services in Tsiigehtchic and all the small communities. That is the work we are doing with Foundation for Change. It is wrong when we tell the community members that they don’t have nursing services. We have nursing services in Tsiigehtchic. I...

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, the Member is absolutely wrong in saying the department is coming up with the plan. I think we’ve learned the last time that coming up with a plan and asking the public to approve the plan did not work. We have learned that. The department staff has been working really hard to gather the data on who the users are, and what their backgrounds are, and what the cost of the services are. We are just providing the raw data. We provided that to the media. We provided that to the committee. We provided that to the public working group and anybody who wants to see...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Member is right; we did make a commitment to have a full consultation process as we went back to work to improve on the information that we had and the discussions that we need to have with the public. We have had that discussion with the public working group as a stakeholder representative. The departmental officials met with them and my information is at the last meeting they had, they wanted the department to come back with more detailed information and this is what they received last Friday. Since then, they have given us feedback that we are...

If we were to, well, I mean, I know that the deputy minister is planning on meeting with the foundation as a member of the board or invited member of the board. With respect to cancer screening, that’s a service issue and it involves... The wait list is not necessarily because of the spacing issue but is because of the lack of specialists. Part of the work we are doing is we’re looking to see if we can offer that service not only in Yellowknife at Stanton but also in Hay River and possibly Inuvik. That’s part of the Territory-wide service plan that we’re working on. We would certainly be happy...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the Member for the question. The urgency to make this capital investment at this time is because we need this money to replace the laboratory information system. We are responding to the vendor, General Electric, who has given us notice that they would discontinue supporting this system and gave us two short extensions until November of this year, I believe, or support as of December 2, 2009. So we need to make sure that we have a system in place that’s reliable, because this is essential to our lab service. It deals with reading and connecting all the lab...

I’m not sure if I understand the question. I’d like to give our public a lot more credit than what the Member is suggesting. I think if you see the material on the website, it’s quite plainly written. There will be a facilitator at the meeting that will present the facts. We’re not going to tell people to interpret. We will present the facts and then engage in a dialogue, very much like what we did with the standing committee and very much like what we did, I believe, with the public working group. You lay out the facts and then ask the people for their input. The facts are important, because...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member has been here for 14 years, and he asked exactly the same question, and he understands the challenges we face and the challenges I face as the Minister of Health. This government is more daunting than we’ve ever had before. We have demographics that are changing; needs are changing. We have increased our budget by a large percentage, but our boards are struggling to provide all the services that they need. All indicators are showing that we, by far, are doing better than any other place for this kind of remoteness and this kind of size and the challenges we...

Every effort is being made to make sure that we provide a good health care coverage to everyone in the Territories. The community of Tsiigehtchic is getting better service than any other community that size in the Northwest Territories.

I’m not sure if the Member is asking me about requiring people to have auto insurance. I’m thinking that he’s concentrating on the health insurance. No, we don’t have a system right now where a person goes into...unless they don’t have NWT health care, in which case we’d be interested in how they’re going to pay for it out of their health insurance coverage or their own pocket. As we have the system now, we do not ask people whether they have third-party insurance, because they have never really had to because the GNWT covers for all of their health care if they are eligible under specific...