Sandy Lee

That’s a government-wide work that we’re undertaking and it is a priority for our department. Our director of policy sits on the steering committee and we are involved.

Thank you. We will undertake to provide the Member with all the answers to the questions he raised.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The first item about nurses and how we’re going to make it possible for them to work here, obviously, as a government we are committed and wanting to make sure that we hire and keep as many of our northern nurses as possible. One thing the nurses are actually doing, we have communicated to the nurses who have written to us, is that they should not, actually they should, it’s not a bad thing if there’s local nurses being hired because that means there are jobs there for them to take. Secondly, they wouldn’t be responding to jobs advertising for nurses positions. They...

The department already spends a lot of money and effort on prevention and the recommendations suggest that we must expend that, which we, in principle, agree with, we need to come up with the resources. But I will have to look at the section that the Member is referring to because I am certain that we have every cent of that accounted for. So if we’re going to talk about reprofiling that, we need to have the full scope of the information so we know exactly what we’re changing.

I’m sure as we go through debating our budget in the next couple of days we will have a chance to do that, but I’d be...

No, there is a pretty strict and well laid out capital planning process that we need to meet to go through for all departments when they’re asking for new capital funding. We would have to work through that process and we don’t have the money set aside here for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To my left is Paddy Meade, deputy minister of Health and Social Services; to my right is Mr. Derek Elkin, director of finance; and to my far right is Mr. Dana Heide, assistant deputy minister of operations. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, it was done internally in the department and by the program office, I think, in FMBS was involved as well. I think we talked about this three years ago. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my opening statement to my budget on Friday I stated a couple of programs that we are expanding to Inuvik and Fort Simpson, Healthy Children Initiatives.

Mr. Speaker, I think everybody here knows how the budget process works. A major initiative such as this will require significant funding and the timing issue... Their report came out after we went through the business plan review. The Members had a chance to have a look at this budget in January and the Members are aware that it was not part of that budget.

Mr. Speaker, I think it’s really important for us to state...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think I can safely say that there is no such thing as savings in the health and social services system. We’ve said many times that it’s about bending the trend, if you are lucky, and that’s what we are trying to do. Also to make sure that we look after the care and the quality and the safety of our patients. So a lot of the work that the deputy minister outlined are the things that need to be done on an ongoing basis for any health care system, but we also believe that it is a way and we use the Foundation for Change as the overriding sort of action plan and it is to...

Mr. Speaker, we approve the budget a year at a time. We are considering the budget for 2011-12. The next year’s consideration will go through the regular business plan process this May through September, I would think. Mr. Speaker, by then I am sure that we would have the information.

We need to look at the needs for nurse practitioners and all the other HR issues that the Department of Health and Social Services consider. As I committed already, my officials and the Department of ECE are going to continue to work on this issue, as they came to our attention in the last couple of weeks. Let me...