Sandy Lee

We are working on that right now. That’s what a capital budget review is. The long-term care facilities review has done work on that. It talks about how many bed spaces we need for long-term care territory-wide. That’s a 20-year plan reviewable every five years.

Mr. Speaker, we have to recognize that not everybody in the Territories gets to stay exactly where they want to be. We would like to have people stay in their communities as much as possible, but the assisted living facility in Hay River was built for everybody in the Territories. We do have services in Yellowknife, but whenever there...

Thank you Mr. Chairman. The policy or however you want to call it, the work that we are doing in the Department of Health and Social Services is pretty much in line with what has been there for as long as I have been here, I believe.

I know the Member is right, there are some facilities in the communities that were built by the Housing Corporation in at least three or four communities, but those were not meant to be long-term care as Department of Health and Social Services know it. When we are talking about long-term care, we are talking about acute care or more intense care. I believe there...

As I stated, we are designing a prototype that would go into, well, Smith is a little different because we’re renovating an existing facility. As I mentioned numerous times, we’re looking at a prototype for Level B-C health centre. That’s what’s going to go into Simpson. Well, that will be a renovation too. The functions that are going to be delivered in these programs are similar. So I don’t think it helps to say we don’t look at it as a region. We look at it as a community, we look at it as a health facility that’s going to serve residents in that area. We also look at these health...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think we should not forget that this Assembly and this government is the first to invest into a built-for and custom-designed assisted living facility for persons with disabilities. In this year’s budget we’re spending $2.5 million for a complex in Hay River. That’s a territorial facility and that was one of the largest capital investments that we had on the books for the Department of Health and Social Services.

We also spent a sizeable budget in Yellowknife and other areas, to help families with persons with disabilities. I do appreciate that, as is the case with...

Mr. Chairman, we have already established that that is not the best way to describe that project. Long-term care facility and wellness centre being built in Norman Wells stands on its own. Thank you.

In many ways the Member’s question about Smith and Hay River is related to the work that we are doing in Stanton. Going forward what we need to do not only in programming but especially in the capital plan that’s before us, is that we need to have a system-wide plan and work on facilities, because facilities are built to support the services. What we need to do is make sure that Stanton becomes a true territorial hospital; a true acute care, tertiary, the only acute care facility. Inuvik will be the secondary, second level, high-level care facility. Sort of the hub-and-spoke model is the...

The Member is right; the accounts receivable is one of the factors, but it’s not the biggest or the largest cost driver. I’m pleased to advise the House that it’s this government and this Minister that has signed an agreement. We have now a written agreement with the Nunavut government. We negotiated for two years and we signed in February of 2010. Most of the receivables we have with Nunavut are current. We have an outstanding amount with respect to Nunavut residents we have in extended care, because there were no real written agreements for the last 10 years. So we have finalized that, we...

Yes, I don’t think we have the exact numbers of nursing positions there, but we could get back to the Member on that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are doing some work in Fort Simpson to do “upgrades.” We are also in the books for doing future studies on Simpson Health Centre. Ms. Meade has more information on other work being done in that region.

I thought I answered the question on the long-term care facility. It’s a GNWT facility. We’re going to build it. Health and Social Services will own it. It will be a GNWT asset. We’ll provide O and M for it. Tlicho Community Services Agency doesn’t have anything to do with it.

The reason I wanted to follow up is that I know we have some lease arrangement on the health centre for a part of it. I don’t know if it’s the office or what, because we’ve done some renovations there. They’re not related. That’s not related to this project. This is a GNWT facility.