Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wasn’t going to ask any more questions, but I can’t resist. I’m going to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services a few more questions, getting back to the questions I had earlier. I’ll try to keep the questions pretty straightforward. What planning has gone into a retrofit, a complete retrofit of Stanton Territorial Hospital to date? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just to repeat the officials that work with us in this area, and the Member was there with me this morning, the management of our health care delivery system is saying that before we decide and work on details about what to do with Stanton Territorial Hospital, we need to decide what we’re going to do there. What’s it going to be? What is Stanton going to deliver? What do we want it to do? As you know, capital planning is not just about building a building, because, as the official said, if we just go the way we’ve done before, we’re just going to build based on the old school and as the Member might know, when Stanton Hospital was built 30 years ago, even before they opened the door the building was outdated. From the day it was opened, the building was not designed to deliver the programs that it was required to deliver. We don’t want to make that mistake.
So we want to make sure that we only deliver at Stanton the only acute care services that it can deliver in Yellowknife. As much as possible, we want to optimize the use of the Hay River hospital that’s being retrofitted, the wellness centre and new health facility that we’re going to build in Norman Wells, which is in the books. We believe the Inuvik Hospital is overbuilt and we’re not using it to the max and we want to use that. To do that we need to do the staffing model, the program model, program review, use of technology. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. We are finishing the retrofit in Smith. So, Mr. Speaker, in the interest of doing the right thing and using the money right, we are doing an enormous amount of planning, because when Stanton Hospital is retrofitted we want it to be the modern health facility that does exactly what it’s meant to do and not one thing more. That is that it is efficiently built and effectively used. Thank you.
Thank you. I don’t think the hospital was ever designed to be an office building and that’s probably the first problem. I’d like to ask the Minister, and I know and I appreciate that all this lead-up work has to be done, that has to be done, Mr. Speaker. My point is the capital plan -- and the Minister knows this, she’s been around here for almost 12 years -- that takes time. Getting money in that plan takes time. You’ve already had the Foundation for Change in place for two years. You’ve had two years. You say you’re working through all these things. When is the process to get all those things addressed going to match up with us getting the capital dollars required to build or retrofit that Stanton Territorial Hospital? Thank you.
Thank you. The breaking news is it has begun. So I don’t know why he keeps asking when is this going to start. That was the entire discussion this morning. He has a nasty habit of not changing his view in the face of good and current information. So the breaking news: planning has begun. There is money in the budget for planning for Stanton. I believe it’s about $900,000. The PA and the CEO and an entire health care team are working on how to make that facility work. So we will do that work, and when it’s ready it would go to peer review and follow the regular planning process. We believe it will take at least two or three years and it’s on its way. Work is being done. Thank you.
