Tom Beaulieu

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.

I can provide that information to the Member later on today or tomorrow. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The hospital operating rooms for elective hip surgery or joint surgeries are now running at full capacity. That was effective August 13, 2011. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The public advisory is one of the first key communications that we will do with the community. In the past what we’ve done when we’ve had a couple of lakes in a certain area, we’ve also followed up in writing and attached any other reports that do accompany these type of releases and present them to the First Nations. We know that we’ve had discussions with Dehcho First Nations. In turn they have met with the local chief and senior admin officer from Jean Marie River.

Thank you. Yes, through regulations we can gather the information. However, at this time, like I said, we haven’t gone through the act to gather the information. I’m told that information can be gathered. The electronic medical health records that we are starting to use now allows us to gather information in Yellowknife and Hay River at this time. We need to expand the electronic medical health records right across the Territories as a first step if we’re going to track all the prescription drug use across the Territories. For now we are capable of tracking in Yellowknife and Hay River.

We’re trying to reform governance, first of all. We are trying to work with the human resources to get professional at attracting practitioners. But the key is consultation. We have to consult with the communities in order to reform governance. We can’t go in there and say you’re losing five positions, Hay River, they’re going to be moved here; Fort Smith is losing all their doctors, they’re going to be moved here without proper consultation. At the first Joint Leadership Council some of the board members were not happy with this. They want us to continue to push and sell the communities where...

Just from memory I do believe there are two larger communities that have nurse practitioner positions. One is filled and the rest of the nurse practitioner positions are actually located in Yellowknife, but I don’t know how many of those are actually earmarked as nurse practitioner positions, off the top of my head.