Tom Beaulieu

Again, if there’s an accident and someone is in an accident that is on a highway that is out of one of the communities and it’s not something covered by medical travel or medevac services, as for the information I have, I’m not familiar with what the protocol is for getting people on the highways for such an accident as this. The first responders recognize that we’re trying to put regulations in to add emergency medical services in the medical professional umbrella legislation so that we can have that, so that we can have ambulance services where people would be qualified and insurable to be...

Thank you. To introduce more long-term care beds is a capital item, but we are working on that. So just to indicate what type of work we’re doing, I guess leading up to the need for more capital, I again ask the deputy minister to provide some detail.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The funding for the authorities in the travel area is not broken out separately. It is rolled into the grants and contributions.

Thank you, Madam Chair. To my right I have Debbie DeLancey, deputy minister of Health and Social Services. To my left is Jeannie Mathison, director of finance, Health and Social Services. Thank you.

Madam Chair, although we feel at the department that there’s some risk to manage in monitoring and auditing what we’re doing, we need to provide comfort with the physicians that are going to work within the system. There seems to be a groundswell of support to go into the midwives. If we just added the midwives this coming fiscal year in Hay River, it would cost us additional money. If we were to move money within our midwives plan, move money around, we could move to hiring midwives. But to clearly understand here that we could run into some serious issues with managing risk, we need to have...

Thank you, Madam Chair. No, we don’t pay anything over and above what services are provided by them, the money that’s provided by them to cover medical costs. They pay us in addition to that an administrative fee to administer that NIHB.

Thank you. Yes, I did misunderstand the question. I thought she was telling me that the physicians were refusing and I said I didn’t know why that was happening. But again, we are looking at that. We think that is one of the emerging issues in the whole issue of chronic disease management, and we recognize that this is an issue and we’re hoping that once the committee is able to discuss this, that changes can be made in the system and it can become part of the insured services. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have some progress to report within the last month. I would like the deputy minister just to provide the details of the progress we’ve made in this area.

There was no specific reason for it to be here. The only other option would be to break it out on its own, and if that’s the request of the House, then we would break it out on its own in the next cycle.

We are not aware of any shortfalls anywhere in the third-party billing.