Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In early 2012, Alberta Blue Cross completed an analysis and report on the NWT pharmaceutical strategy policy options for the Government of the Northwest Territories. This included a number of observations and recommendations to the government.

I don’t have the costs here. I’m sure that we would be able to determine the cost of what it would be when someone misses an appointment, but this is a missed appointment for an individual that doesn’t show up at the doctor’s office and a percentage of that time will come down to a cost. Sometimes they replace the patient with a waiting list, but what I can do is develop a cost for the percentage.

That percentage was a percentage that came from medical travel. It was all medical travel that includes the medical travel within the territory coming to Yellowknife, going to Inuvik, or also...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Medical travel is a clinical decision, first of all. Secondly, the policy is that medical travel, from the office here in Yellowknife, does contact the authority; the authority contacts the patient. The patient would then contact medical travel and make the arrangements for the travel and to make it to the appointment. It should generally be a fairly simple process. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we can take a look at the patterns of where the infections are occurring and correlate them to whether or not they are caused by overcrowding.

Overcrowding is probably the number one factor to the spread of this infection. I can talk to not only the Minister of the Housing Corporation but also other Cabinet colleagues on this issue to try to address that as soon as possible. Thank you.

We do recognize it. The department is monitoring the fact that we’re expecting an increase of 44 percent from this year, once we project to the end of the year over last year. There are definitely things that have to occur, and those things are, again, trying to work with the communities and trying to really pinpoint where the issue is greatest. We know that in the Tlicho Community Services Agency we are working closely with them to address the issue of our high rates of MRSA in that region. Any area where we consider there to be high rates by community, we will work closely with them to try...

By knowing where the incidents are and monitoring this infection, we are in a sense, I guess, tracking. That is what is happening. We also are projecting to see if we can predict what is happening and try to do some prevention work. We are continuing to examine the patterns and the causes of this infection through the NWT, by monitoring the cases that are being reported. Thank you.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. The department is doing their business of advising the local housing authorities through the chief public health officer. The chief public health officer is discussing the clinical practice guidelines with the authorities on what needs to be done to address this virus, the MRSA. That’s the work we are doing right now. The public health officer is working with the authorities to get the information out to the communities.

I think there are a few questions there. What we’re doing is we’re bringing these individuals together. We’ve appointed an overall chair of the groups. We have one group that is going to do the Beaufort-Delta. We have another group that is going to do the Sahtu and Tlicho communities. We have another group that’s going to do Deh Cho and South Slave, and we have another group that’s going to do Hay River and Yellowknife. They’re going to get together and they’re going to determine what the best action would be to go out into the communities to gather information. At the end of all of their...

No. The only people that have the power to determine capital infrastructure is this House.

I don’t think there is any issue with the department tabling a report. I think we want to take a look at it to have a discussion with ABC on the recommendations that they made. They made some recommendations specifically to why they feel that the pharmaceutical expenses are so high in the Northwest Territories. So we need to have that discussion with them. We’d like to have that discussion with ABC one time before we do a tabling of the report.

I can commit to saying that we will have that discussion to ensure that the information in their recommendations made is based on information that is...