Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I made a Member's statement on the doctors and how only 45 per cent of residents in the Northwest Territories had regular doctors, explaining the problems with that, while the rest of Canada is averaging over 80 per cent. I would like to ask the Minister if he can tell this House if the department is still trying to hire doctors to live in the Northwest Territories? Thank you.
Masi. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we are committed to trying to fill all of our physician positions with local practitioners rather than locum practitioners. We run about a 23.6 per cent vacancy, and we continue to recruit pretty much all the time. That is both for the GPs and for the specialists.
We do recognize that it is a challenge. We are trying to do a few things differently that will hopefully help us improve some of our numbers. One of the things we have done is we have recently talked to the University of Alberta about running a medical residency program here in the Northwest Territories. We are somewhat early days in discussion on that, but we think there is a real opportunity to get some of the students up here to do some of the residency placements. Hopefully, they will fall in love with the place as much as you and I.
That is good news about the residents. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the Minister if the Minister can tell us if the communities of Hay River, Forts Smith and Simpson, Behchoko, Norman Wells, and Inuvik have local doctors? What is the percentage of local doctors, the vacancy rate, in those communities?
Mr. Speaker, we have most of the positions filled in Yellowknife. We do still need some locums to cover time off, sick time, annual time, those types of things, and people do come and go, so there is turnover in Yellowknife, as well. Beaufort Delta and Inuvik, right now we are pretty fully staffed. I believe there are five physicians out of five up there on a permanent basis, but, you know, any one of them could leave at any time, so we must continue to recruit, even when positions are filled, just to keep the awareness up.
When it comes to Norman Wells, Forts Smith and Simpson, we have reoccurring locums, so individuals who come back on a regular basis, but do not permanently reside. When they are not there, we do have to rely on other short-term locums. We continue to recruit in those areas, as well. Hopefully, when we open the Norman Wells Health Centre, that might be a bit of a draw for somebody who might want to come and be part of that new facility. We will continue to recruit at the same time.
In Hay River we have, I think it is, three permanent physicians now, but some of the them, I think, are already at a percentage of a full FTE, so we still have some locums there, as well. We will continue to do everything that we can to promote this beautiful territory, the great jobs that are here, and an opportunity to come and work with our residents from across the territory.
I would like to ask the Minister if there are any doctors living in Yellowknife who do most of their practicing in one of the other communities I mentioned in my previous question?
Yes, Mr. Speaker, we moved to a single medical system here in the Northwest Territories, even though we have individuals located in different communities. We do have physicians who will travel to other communities. Some of our communities, as the Member is aware, do not have permanent physicians, some of our smaller, more rural communities, so doctors will travel to those communities, but not just doctors. We have community health nurses and advanced practice specialists who have additional training. They can do some things like suturing and some level of diagnosis based on formulary and other work. We have other professionals come out, as well. Yes, doctors do travel to communities throughout the Northwest Territories.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the Minister if there is an actual plan to be rolled out. The plan I guess I am referring to is -- I do not know what it is called, but I am kind of calling it a territorial doctors pool. Is there an actual plan? I know that, when we try to hire doctors, some doctors do not want to live in the small communities because of services for their children, and services for children are just not in in the small communities.
Yellowknife can provide almost all the services, so, as opposed to using locums, is there an actual plan to build a territorial doctors pool here in Yellowknife that will actually work maybe half-time in Hay River, as an example, or half-time in another community? Thank you.
That is actually one exact model that has been discussed previously, and we have explored it. We do have some of our physicians who can go out and provide time in other locations. There has been talk about expanding the pool in Yellowknife so that we can do that coverage rather than rely on locums. We still have trouble recruiting physicians, so we continue to try to figure out how to move that, roll that forward. In the meantime, we continue to provide that distance care.
One of the things that many of the doctors have approached us on, as well as practitioners throughout the system, and we have looked at other systems, are some changes to our primary healthcare model to change it more to a team-based approach where there are groups of physicians, nurses, social workers, counsellors, who are working together in teams or pockets who can provide coverage and care to different groups throughout the Northwest Territories. It is a model similar to the one that was put in place in one of the Indigenous health authorities in Alaska. So we are looking at that right now to see how that might be something that we could roll out. Since we have moved forward with health transformation, now is the logical time for us to look at this more comprehensively, build upon primary healthcare to provide overall, collaborative, integrated, team-based care to residents of the Northwest Territories. That pool would fall in there, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
