Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to continue questions with the Minister of Health and Social Services on the area of medical travel and services provided to our constituents. Part of the issue here is that we go to great pains to provide medical services to people who self-inflict particular issues to themselves, whether it’s through alcoholism or drugs. We have people with weight-loss problems and diabetes problems. who the Minister is saying are exempt from the policy. I think that’s wrong, because people are burdened with an unfair chance and we don’t provide them the support.
I’m trying to get the Minister to go back and review these files, because I’m talking about people who were previously approved and even recently approved, as far back as last fall, to go to Edmonton for specialized services. Would the Minister go back and review these files to see if we can make sure these people can get back in the queue and get services for medical treatment?
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
As I’ve already indicated, we have very good medical and health care coverage. The weight loss reduction procedure is not a health care program that’s covered anywhere. We have discovered that some of them were approved by mistake and we are not going to approve that. We are working on developing a program that can help these clients in the North, because we have in fact discovered that some of the programs they were getting down south were in private clinics and something that we could look into doing here. We do need to do more here.
With respect to paying clinic files, those are private clinic treatments and the only thing we’re asking is that they make contact with their physicians to make sure that the physician supervises their files. I don’t think that’s asking for much. Our program is still very good and we need to respect the integrity of our programs.
I appreciate the Minister’s answer but it’s lacking a particular element that even recently, this last fall, that this constituent went for medical advice, they got a recommendation from the doctor, the doctor processed the papers through the normal channels, the normal channels approved them, and they went to Edmonton to start their treatment. Then, of course, when they tried to do their follow-up, all of a sudden the policy doesn’t apply. So one day it applies and the next day it applies. That same type of treatment was successful on another family member and they used the same travel policy to get services. Would the Minister review this file and take a serious look at this and say, wait a minute, why are we doing this to people? Why are we supporting them?
I’m not sure what files he’s talking about and we can’t talk about private files here. I do want to say that our Medical Travel Policy, I don’t think he’s talking about the Medical Travel Policy because medical travel comes when our residents are approved for a procedure outside of the NWT and we cover for that. It comes from what the original procedure is that they were approved and our policy is sound. We found out that the policy was not applied properly and we made sure that whoever was approving those procedures was informed about the fact that those procedures they were approving are not allowable within our guidelines. So we’re following the procedure.
I continue to get further disappointed, if it’s possible, on this particular case. We have a system that has approved people to travel. We have a system now that says, well, I’m sorry, our system doesn’t like this particular case, we’re not going to allow you to travel down for needed medical care. This is doctor prescribed care. This is not sort of somebody saying, hey, you should do this. This is needed care. It’s quite demoralizing when one day you go down for treatment and the next day you’re told, sorry, you don’t qualify. I’m asking for some empathy in this particular question. Could the Minister show some compassion to these particular files? I brought three recently to her particular attention. Would she be willing to review them and see if there’s a way to make this work?
The Member knows that a lot of situations and files come to my desk. We review them to make sure the policy is applied. If the physicians order procedures that are not eligible for coverage under our program, they would be advised, which is the situation that happened with the weight loss reduction procedures. All the doctors have been given clinical guidelines to make sure that they understand this. We have lots of doctors coming and going in the Territories and they need to always be getting these messages. So I’ll be happy to look at any file that the Member is asking, but we would always make sure that our policy is being adhered to.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. Final supplementary, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
