Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. It has to do with our medical travel. We have a very comprehensive Medical Travel Policy in the Northwest Territories and I would suggest that most of the time it works really, really well. Occasionally, though, we bring to the floor of this House some anomaly, some glitches where there are problems.
The policy is well-known that if somebody requires medical travel it has to originate within the Northwest Territories. However, this does not address the situation that I described today in my Member’s statement where we have a student that’s already halfway towards the facility where they need to receive medical attention from the specialist.
Now, the Minister could solve this with a one-off kind of answer about this particular instance, but I would like to ask the Minister if she would be willing to have her department look at the whole issue of medical travel for students attending post-secondary education and how we might come up with a policy framework that allows for some discretionary type approval for situations like this.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member brought this matter to my attention about 11:00 this morning. My staff and her staff are looking at the specific situation, but I do agree with the Member that we need to make sure that the students who are away and considered NWT residents in any other way should be able to take advantage of their medical travel. So I am reviewing the policy; not the policy, I have to first find out what is going on with this. I’m sure within the policy we can make this happen.
There are no doubt, I mean, the Medical Travel Policy is, no doubt, a very expensive policy and very expensive exercise of the Department of Health and Social Services because we do live in the North and we are remote from some of the very specialized services that are required by our constituents. It’s a very large ticket item. It’s very expensive. Sometimes things are done which might actually seemingly waste money, but the opportunity to save money is here before us.
I’d like to ask the Minister if there is anyone within the organization who looks after medical travel or medical insurance issues who she could see her way clear to give the kind of authority to, that could deal with things like this so that they don’t end up having to reach her desk here in the Legislative Assembly.
Without having reviewed the specific situation I’m not able to say right now whether or not this is a deficiency in the policy or it’s a case of someone just not using the full breadth of the policy. I do need to look at this first.
Right now we do not have an appeal mechanism under the medical policy. That’s the second part of the question. The review that we’re doing of the policy will contemplate that and the changes that we’re suggesting in other policy that we can’t talk about yet, we are looking at that as a part of the larger review of the medical policy. In this situation I’m hesitant to say that it’s either misapplication of the policy or the lack of the policy or anything until we find out exactly what happened, because in my two and a half years here I’ve not had any case like this. It could be that this might be an anomaly. I need to get some more facts.
We have a lot of students from the North who do attend post-secondary facilities in Alberta. It seems to almost be a destination of choice. I don’t have any statistics to bear that out. Where a constituent or resident can prove a cost savings to the government, the cost to get from Grande Prairie to Edmonton to see a specialist is a lot less than getting from Hay River to Edmonton. Where it is an absolute, undeniable, proven case of where it would cost less to waive the policy about it having to originate in the Northwest Territories, would this not be something that the Minister could simply and quickly and expeditiously put into place?
Yes, I would be interested in looking at that I will get back to the Member quickly.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko.
