I will work with the NWT Seniors’ Society, which is made up of seniors from all the communities – I believe the president of the seniors’ societies in the various communities for the NWT Seniors’ Society – to see if we could redistribute the money that’s going to the seniors. If it’s possible to put little pots of money into the communities so they can do those functions, I will make note of and discuss that with the NWT Seniors’ president and the society. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At this time the funding from the Department of Health and Social Services for seniors’ groups in the Northwest Territories is to the NWT Seniors’ Society which, in turn, works with the seniors’ societies at the community level.

I actually don’t know if that includes hip surgery. What I do know is that the operating room seems to have resolved all of the sterilization issues and continues to work on the sterilization issues. As I indicated, the hospital is old and they are doing their best to maintain the pH levels at the operating table. But specific to actual hip replacement surgeries, I am not 100 percent sure on that, but I can get back to the Member on that. Thank you.

Yes, we can do that.

We will be working with our partners at the Bureau of Statistics. We’re going to include questions on prescription drug use the next time we do addictions surveys, the general addictions survey. That survey is scheduled to begin in late 2012.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The information is not available because the department does not track use of opiates. However, we do have the NWT Pharmacy Act which will give us the power to set up the regulations, but we don’t have the funding to set it up. Health Canada does track non-insured health benefits prescription use, if they’re going to that program to purchase the prescription drugs; but if they pay cash, we don’t track that either. Thank you.

I can’t give that information. I don’t know when we’re going to be expanding nurse practitioners. What I do know is that when we do produce nurse practitioners, educate registered nurses to become nurse practitioners, their desire to work in Yellowknife is greater than the desire to go over to the regional centres. That’s why we had the nurse practitioners here. We’d love to have nurse practitioners in the regional centres. We’d love to have the nurse practitioners in the larger communities because they do have an expanded role more than registered nurses. But at this time, they are here.

At...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Although we see that it’s difficult to fill doctors’ positions in the regional centres where the positions are located – Fort Smith, Hay River, Inuvik, Norman Wells and Fort Simpson – that’s still our first priority. Our first priority is still to try to fill those positions in those communities. Failing that, we’re having discussions and have had discussions with the Joint Leadership Council, which are the boards or public administrators, to talk about the possibility of having one system pooling doctors in Yellowknife and having the locums come out of Yellowknife as...

We would like to use telehealth wherever we can. There is an issue with bandwidth, as well, at some of the health centres in the various communities, but if we can use telehealth, we will use telehealth as much as we can. We will expand the use of it as it goes along. As the health professionals get more comfortable with it, we will be expanding the use of telehealth.

Thank you. We do use telehealth. We do have patients and nurses or patients and doctors that are in the more remote communities or even in the regional centres, depending on what the issue is, to communicate with the doctors here in Yellowknife if need be. Those are the type of things we’re using telehealth for at this time. We would be able to expand the use of telehealth once the fibre optic links are completed across the territory. Thank you.