Sandy Lee

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Further to my returns to written questions earlier today I wish to table the following three documents entitled NWT Women Giving Birth - Number of Discharges In and Outside of the NWT 2005-2006 to 2009-2010; Program Enrolments and Graduates for All Nursing Programs Between 1998 and 2011; and Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Enrolments by Ethnicity and Year, 2006-2011.

We are talking about I think two things here. On both counts we are doing a review. One, the Member is aware of the mental health and addictions review that we are undertaking as an entire mental health programming at the hospital as well as in communities. We acknowledge that there is room for improvement in that area and we have hired a study team, consulting team who have been here and talked to the stakeholders. We’re looking forward to having recommendations on that to improve our Mental Health and Addictions Program as a whole.

With respect to the psychiatric unit, every incident where...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That’s a pretty broad question. Being a facility that it is and the services it provides, there are any number of processes in place to review incidents and happenings at the hospital. If the Member wants to be more specific, I can try to address those.

As I indicated, they had one initial meeting and I’m not sure if there’s a whole lot to report right now, but I am committed to working with them. I think we should give them a chance to meet and discuss and think through about where they want to go on the next phase.

I just want to repeat that my department, my officials that work with the seniors, they have a very good working relationship with them as the people who work on the Family Violence Coalition as the other coalitions we have. We have our staff working with the NGOs and stakeholders in these groups. As the material arrives from them...

My understanding is that the coalition had one meeting and they are going to continue to meet to work on making a proposal to the government on phase 3. The past practices have been not only with this Family Violence Coalition but also the Homelessness Coalition. Those are groups made up of people in the field as well as some of the government staff. Traditionally, we let them do their work and they will make their presentations to appropriate departments and the Ministers. It’s not a normal practice for a Minister to tell them what to do. Obviously, I am here standing ready to hear from them...

I think I should give him my profile of where we are with home care programming that we’re doing right now. I would be happy to give him information on where we need to go and where we plan to go. Obviously, all the time it’s subject to funding. I’ve presented information to standing committee about growing funding needs. We want to expand the Home Care Program. We want to do different things with mental health programming. We have $40 million or $50 million asked right now with the Department of Health and Social Services that we will be prioritizing and bringing forward in months to come.

I didn’t know that’s what the Member was referring to. The Member knows already, and I’ve already said that in the standing committee briefing last week and throughout the Committee of the Whole debates, that that’s the direction we need to take. We’re expanding the long-term care facilities in Behchoko from eight beds to 18 beds. We’re going to have an 18-bed facility in Norman Wells. Even in those facilities we could use personal attendants and home support workers.

We want to expand the Home Support Worker Program and Home Care Program in many other regions and communities. Yellowknife, I...

Thank you. Unless the Member has information otherwise, I do believe that the NWT society’s work on elder abuse workshops and conferences over the years has been from the funding from the Department of Health and Social Services and government. We are a close partner with the society in working on elder abuse. They’ve identified that financial abuse is the latest topic that they wanted to work on, and we put in some federal funding and our own funding to do a pan-territorial campaign on elder abuse, which has been quite successful. So, Mr. Speaker, we fund the NWT Seniors’ Society. We also...

Thank you. Because it’s about creating an entire bureaucracy to do something that is already being done by many, many departments in the government. If you look at the entire GNWT -- and the Member’s statement stated that already -- a large part of what we do in Health and Social Services is providing services to seniors and elders, whether it be hospital care, or long-term care, or home care, extra health benefits, a large part of Housing work is providing services to the elders. There are special programs for income support under ECE. Municipal Affairs even is doing Elders in Motion. So the...

As I indicated, I received this about two weeks ago. It’s under review and I will have to get back to the Member in due course. Thank you.