Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on my Member’s statement from earlier today. Of course, we’re focusing on treatment for alcohol and drug addictions, so my questions will be for the Minister of Health and Social Services. We’ve heard the Minister explain in the past that there are many options for treatment in the South. Could the Minister explain how the department selects these addictions treatment centres? In other words, how does the department decide which are eligible and which are not?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Treating people in southern institutions is not a new thing. Treating people in southern institutions is not something that happened because Nats’ejee K’eh shut down. This is something that was ongoing. Individuals have come to us and have gone for treatment while Nats’ejee K’eh was still operating, have gone for treatment in the South. How the department selected this is after working with the various treatment centres down south, they looked at the places they felt would best suit our needs for the people of the Northwest Territories and had signed contracts at four treatment facilities down south.
Thanks for that response and I’m certainly aware that we’ve done this for a long time and this is not something that we just started. I imagine that these different treatment centres use different approaches to treatment and that may be appropriate for people with different backgrounds.
Could the Minister provide an overview of the main schools of thought in terms of how to treat addictions? Thank you.
I guess, in general, there could be a treatment centre down south that we are in a contractual relationship with that may be able to address more complex types of treatment. It could be dealing with harder drugs. There could be a treatment centre down south that could treat alcohol. There could be a treatment facility that would deal with a lot of the traditional and cultural type of treatment. And there’s a treatment facility down south that may be able to address women’s treatment. Thank you.
If we’re going to make progress on this, we need to be able to define what we think success looks like and find a way to measure it.
Could the Minister explain how the department currently defines and measures success in terms of addictions treatment? Mahsi.
That’s a very difficult question. Success is largely measured by the individual themself who is attending treatment. Sometimes the counsellors and individuals determine success by the individual attending treatment. Sometimes they determine success by the individual finishing treatment and sometimes they determine success by the length of time the individual stays clean and sober after treatment. There’s no specific time. Some people say they have reached success if they have been sober six months, some is a year and some don’t ever believe they will ever reach success because they will never feel they are completely away from addictions and addictions is a daily battle. So success is very difficult to measure. If we were to develop a program to follow an individual once treatment was completed, then we would also have to get some approvals from individuals that had gone through treatment. Once an individual has finished treatment, they don’t want to be in touch with that facility. Some do, but not everyone. But a lot of them say no, once I’m done here, I’m done. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
Thanks to the Minister for that. I believe the Minister provided a range of possible measures. I was hoping to hear how he defines success, what we mean by success. So I’d appreciate any comments the Minister might have on that.
Could the Minister commit to provide this House with an evaluation of the success of each of the current addictions treatment centres that we refer people to? At a minimum, statistics on short-term and long-term relapse rates would be useful, but I imagine the department has other measures of success it could report on. Mahsi.
Thank you. I view success as a change in life, a complete change in lifestyle of individuals from using or consuming to not using or consuming, but also change other parts of their life as well. We can do that. We can go and try to determine what we consider to be success for the facilities that we’ve engaged in and will be in a contractual arrangement until March 31, 2014.
We can also go back to the records and maybe look at some success rates at Nats’ejee K’eh to see what type of rates they felt were success rates. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
