Tom Beaulieu

I can have the department check into the status of the program specifically in Fort Liard and report that back to the Member.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll have the assistant deputy minister provide a detailed response on that.

As the House knows, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Social Services is working on early childhood development. Our role there is working on expanding the Healthy Family Program across the Northwest Territories, including expansion in the Deh Cho.

We don’t know the overall size of the capital project but part of the planning was a process development of the plan. We’re anticipating that the capital planning will be done over a fairly extended period of time.

As I indicated in the last couple of days, we’re not anticipating that all of the work will happen over a very short period, because the Stanton Hospital will have to remain operational throughout the construction stage. We are expecting this to be a longer period and as the areas get completed, we will move to another area and utilize the hospital as it renews. With that, I would...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have that information on when the vacancy… I suppose there is a vacancy in Fort Liard, but I am prepared to look at filling that vacancy as quickly as possible.

The business case allows us to provide a cost-benefit analysis seeing the full cost and the other benefits of creating this flexibility into the physician funding. That is what is needed for us to give the FMB comfort if and when they make a decision to create flexibility in the funding to allow us to bring other than just doctors into this type of funding.

The department has not identified specific infrastructure that could be used for residential treatment; however, it is one of the mandates of the Minister’s Forum on Addictions to look at as they travel from community to community having meetings with the communities. One of their other mandates is to determine what type of treatment would be required in which location, and once they’ve made that recommendation to the department, the department will look at trying to match the infrastructure that exists in those locations.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The money usually doesn’t sit unused, first of all. When they’re unable to fill the doctor positions, the physician positions, then we use the money to bring in locums. In as far as the flexibility of funding goes, we are looking at putting some flexibility into the funding. The funding for physicians is restricted by FMB direction, so in order for us to build flexibly into that, we have to go back to the Financial Management Board to build that flexibility to bring in, as an example the Member used, nurse practitioners to fill the role in certain communities. We are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I would be able to provide that information for the Member. Thank you.

Two things. First, I would offer committee an opportunity for us to do a presentation on the electronic medical records and, yes, they would be rolled out across the territory. That’s the intent of the medical records.