Tom Beaulieu

Mr. Speaker, this particular situation has occurred recently and has occurred in the past. We’ve responded to it in various ways. Right now there is no actual requirement for a nurse to go out and go onto the site of an accident, for example. We will, as a department, deal with this situation, because we would like to be able to respond as well. This is why we are looking at a possible way of trying to develop some first responders in the community that can do that work for us. We will work with the authorities and give direction to the authorities to work with our interdepartmental advisory...

Mr. Speaker, like I said, we are looking at that. We need to cost the whole project out. It would be a fairly expensive proposition, because inside the first responders, we are also talking about how we get to the individual, and that would mean ground ambulance. We are also talking about remote areas where it’s not coming by highway and how we’re going to be able to respond to that as well.

We need to examine this. We need to develop some cost implications to our decisions and then move forward from there. Thank you.

Any facility that is built by the department or by this government would have to go through the House. What we’re doing is looking at all the needs across the Territories and if there is a need for long-term care facilities, then we start working into the capital planning process with that need.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t know what the waiting time is for the long-term care in Inuvik. I don’t have the waiting list with me at this time.

I’m assuming that the Member has the information that those rates of exams or tests are lower than in the larger centres. I don’t have that information here. I think the standard, when we try to do cancer awareness or try to do early detection, is to try to do something that’s standard across the territory, except for in situations where communities are considered to have a spike in cancer rates in their specific communities. We try to work with those communities to look at all the cancer rates, but the standard is that we are supposed to be applying the same across the Territories regardless...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Health does a lot of work in the cancer area, and the department has developed a cancer awareness and response strategy that was funded during this fiscal year, and we have been doing work in various areas under the chief public health officer. I guess that’s how we’re trying to respond to the cancer awareness. Thank you.

Yes. I would commit to completing the assessment for the need of long-term care beds in Hay River and try to move that to the capital planning process as soon as possible.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve said in this House many times that we are going to do everything possible to keep the seniors in their home communities as much as possible. The only time we wish to move seniors is when there is no long-term care available in their communities and they have to go to long-term care, then we will sometimes move them to another long-term care facility. For the most part, the idea is to keep people as close to home as possible.

Thank you. I see the HPV advertisements on the television, I notice that they’re put on by the Nunavut government and I don’t know that the Government of the Northwest Territories has the same type of campaign for HPV. But I know that awareness of the types of cancer that we find most prevalent are the ones that we’re trying to campaign as in colorectal, prostate and lung cancer for men, and colorectal, lung and breast cancer for women. Thank you.

The Member will be able to see it as a line item in the capital plan once it goes through the capital planning process in this House.