Thank you, Mr. Speaker. A couple of months ago our Minister of Finance took to the skies with his childhood bag of Legos and travelled the territory to talk to the people about the budget. I must admit the format was unique and provided some visual interaction, but months later, after the report has been tabled, one must look back and ask what we learned. What was used from this experience to influence the main estimates we’re currently reviewing? Did we listen? More importantly, did we hear the wishes of our people?
Interestingly, we are currently looking at the Department of Health and Social Services budget and I find myself dusting off this Budget Dialogue 2012 report to see what was captured and what was being transferred to good use today. Health was cited by most participants as the area where there were the most opportunities for savings. Suggestions range from cost reduction in administration of medical travel, using strategic staffing, using technology to reduce medical travel and investing in healthy lifestyles. These were all opportunities of efficiencies.
Medical travel, comments like “unnecessary trips to Edmonton” and “bad enough I had to travel to Yellowknife for medical reasons, even worse when I found out my appointment was cancelled” and “government needs to be vigilant about the abuse of the privilege” clearly shows opportunity for savings or potential abuse of the system. Some participants also indicated to have a better use of existing resources. Another quote, “We need to keep people in the North to get the treatment they need. That could be a cost-saving measure.” I agree. Reducing our need to fly people down south, in itself, is a very forward-thinking approach to reducing our medical travel costs. I applaud the residents who came up with that.
However, the many ideas generated for reducing the costs of medical travel, such as better scheduling practices to avoid these multiple trips and long stays, these checks and balances to reduce cancellation and missed appointments, and better coordination of our patients’ medical appointments, for the most part have fallen on deaf ears as we do not see any changes to these recommendations or any of this action today. This is very unfortunate.
I can speak to many more residents’ suggestions that are now part of the GNWT archaeological archives of other countless reports, but I’ll stop here. I will use this Budget Dialogue 2012 report to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services the appropriate questions later today.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
