Tom Beaulieu

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Monday, June 3, 2013, I will move that Bill 21, An Act to Amend the Dental Profession Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The process of appointing a new board is going to start immediately. We are looking at the governance. In 2011 we had a report done by a consultant. The conclusion was that the system, as it is, is not sustainable. We are working with a Joint Leadership Council that includes all the chairs and all the boards looking at a sustainable government system first. Once we have a good system that we think that we are comfortable with right across the Territories, we are going to put the board in place. We also recognize that we were waiting for the CEO to come in. That has happened, so we can start...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess aside from having some contact with the MLAs from the Beaufort-Delta, we have not discussed reappointment of a health board with the Aboriginal governments or the other municipal governments in the Beaufort-Delta. We have continued to work with the public administrator in the Beaufort-Delta.

Yes, I think there is a way that we can improve the communication and I will have that discussion with the executive, and they will, in turn, have a discussion with the people that are responsible for making sure that the lines are open when people want to get a hold of information.

The reason that the applications are often returned is an issue of ensuring that people are eligible for health care cards when they apply for it. There is information that is needed on the health care card that guarantees that those individuals are eligible, and we are trying to comply to previous issues where...

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. There are 11,600 until birthdates, until the 16th of May of this month, and at that point we had processed approximately 86 percent of those. But right up until the end of 2013 we will have about 38,000 people right from January too. So another 26,000 and some-odd cards, people whose cards will expire from May until December. Then the rest of the people, the 3,000 or so residents of the NWT, their cards will be expiring in 2014.

I will assume that the Territorial Electronic Medical Record Project Team will be looking at best practices across the Territories and then put the information together for the act, and also that they had also reviewed all of the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendations, and through the review they have addressed the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner pertaining to this area.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Health Information Act is top priority for the Department of Health and Social Services, and we would be hoping that the bill will be ready for introduction in the 2013 fall session.

If we thought there were shortfalls, we wouldn’t be putting in such a system. We feel that this is an improvement. We’re handing a patient over the same way that all of Alberta that medevac people into Edmonton hand their patients over. We think we’re handing them over to the Alberta Health Services at that point and we think that the patient is getting good care, excellent care from the time that they arrive. They’re able to go into the terminal, they’re able to turn the plane around quicker, the medevac plane can have a patient waiting there, delivered there by Alberta Health Services and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The fact that the Edmonton Centre Airport closed down was not a decision that laid with this government. The fact that there is more time to fly to the International Airport is because it happens to be further away than the Municipal Airport. However, what I was referring to was the care once the person arrived. We are able to move the person that is being medevaced to Edmonton into an ambulance service that would take them through the city and we are able to hand them over at the airport instead of outside, or having a contractor that we were contracting from here pick...

All of the standards for the medevacs are laid out in the contracts between Stanton and the people that provide medevac services. Again, it would be difficult to put an actual time period in any specific community because it would depend largely on what type of craft would be needed.

In this specific case, the plane that would be ready under normal circumstances to pick up a medevac was not suitable to go into Trout Lake. They had to reconfigure a different plane. That took some time.

I agree with the Member that there was too much time at the outset contacting the medical people, and we are...