Tom Beaulieu

The Member is right; this is in the Inuvik Regional Hospital. We will be incorporating this into the Hay River Health Centre and also into the renovations that would be… We would plan it into the renovations of Stanton.

I understand that in order to continue to use a facility that may have reached the end of its life, we would have to coordinate that with a technical department like Public Works and Services so that if there are upgrades necessary, we need to determine the costs of continuing to use the facility regardless of what it would be used for. We would have to do some sort of technical evaluation to determine whether or not we would be better off just to build something new.

Mr. Chair, no problem. We can do that.

When you replace a facility like a hospital, one of the main reasons for replacing a facility is not for what you see physically, it’s for how the building functions and how the building operates. The guts of the building are what get outdated and have to change. That in the H.H. Williams Hospital has gone beyond its date of good economic use. That is one factor. However, we would be prepared to take a look at using portions of that building if we thought that a treatment facility located in Hay River was the best value for our money.

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.

Generally, with communities that have approximately the same types of needs, we build a prototype. A facility in a community of approximately 500 to 1,000 people would generally have the same building built in their communities.