Tom Beaulieu

Yes, Mr. Chair.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I rise in favour of the motion today. I recognize that this is a very serious matter for some families. As indicated, I think sometimes the loss of a very young child goes almost unnoticed by the general population, even if it’s in the communities. But it never goes unnoticed or is forgotten by the parents.

I knew a young lady as a young mother who lost a child, and 30 years later it was still on her mind, and her baby was 35 days old. This is direction to the Legislature that Cabinet will be voting in favour of the motion. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. The Department of Health and Social Services is able to gather all of the information necessary to modernize the Medical Travel Policy and the Medical Travel Program. At this time, some of those issues are the exact things we’re trying to work out of the system. We recognize that medical travel is a very important part of people travelling to appointments because we can’t always bring the doctors to the people. So we are working with that, we’re looking at some electronic aids and so on that would be able to help sometimes and maybe divert medical travel. But at the end of the day...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Anyone travelling with medical travel, according to the policy, should have an after-hours number so that if an individual is returning from medical travel on Sunday, Saturday or a late night flight, then that individual is supposed to be equipped with an after-hours number if they cannot afford to get back home to their community. So if an individual is landing in Inuvik and they are from another community in the area, they would overnight in Inuvik in a boarding home. If they are from Inuvik, they are supposed to just jump in a cab, go home and be reimbursed. If they...

Certainly, we will have a discussion with the dental contractors to provide more days. It would cost the system more money to provide more days. So if what we’re finding is we know the exact amount of days a dentist goes into each community, so we would check to see the utilization of that time that they’re in. An example would be if they spend 43 days in Fort Liard in 2010-11 and 42 days in 2013-14. So there would be no increase, so my assumption would be they weren’t having full utilized days while they were in there. But I will check that and if they are fully utilizing all their days and...

We did not receive any letter opposing this from any resident or health care profession of the Northwest Territories.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Health and Social Services recognizes that poor oral health is costly to our health system and that poor oral health leads to all kinds of other problems that negatively impact students in schools. So what we are doing in the big picture overall is developing an oral health strategy, working with the two northern jurisdictions, Yukon and Nunavut, to develop an oral health strategy.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We did not receive opposition. We received an e-mail of support from them.

As the Member knows, we’ve recently moved the CEO to a position with Health and Social Services. We have an acting CEO and then there’s going to be a new CEO for Hay River coming on stream within weeks. I’ve had that discussion with all of the Joint Senior Management Committee – that’s all of the CEOs across all of the jurisdictions and some senior staff with Health and Social Services – and made it a priority. One of the top three priorities for the health system is recruitment of doctors.

Plan A for the recruitment of doctors would be to recruit doctors in the communities where they will be...

I suppose that possibility could occur.