Thank you, Mr. Speaker. One of the key indicators for evaluating how a health system works is wait times. And right now, you can go to every other jurisdiction or every province in Canada and look up their wait times. And I'd encourage people to do this. If you go to the BC one, it's actually quite an amazing database. You can see every single surgeon and how many procedures they currently have waiting, at which hospitals, at which region. You can see the number of weeks for every single procedure that could be scheduled in the health care system in live reported data, Mr. Speaker. And multiple organizations, including Health Canada take this data from across the country, and they use it to help inform how we need to fund health care. Yet when you go to the Northwest Territories, none of this data is readily available, Mr. Speaker. It is few and far between. And often when it is published, it's published in the amount of people waiting for a procedure, which is not a helpful statistic. If 50 people need a knee replacement, I don't know how long that takes, I have to find a knee surgeon to tell me how long it takes to actually get through 50 people.
Mr. Speaker, I would like us to have this data, and I would like to be giving a statement here on the facts and where we need to improve and put resources. But I don't have that data. So I'm going to share some anecdotal evidence I have on this.
One of my constituents just recently got a knee replacement. It was five years from the time she was told she needs a knee replacement. She's now on the schedule for the next knee replacement and has already, years in advance, booked the after-physiotherapy for that knee replacement knowing the waitlist is so long, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I previously asked in this House about the wait times to get FASD. I know many people who have been waiting for an FASD diagnosis for years, Mr. Speaker a diagnosis that is essential to accessing services that is relevant to getting a person to cope with that disorder, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, I believe that the department is doing some work but I think we really need to prioritize this. I know we're getting a new electronic medical records system, and I would like to thank the department for the work they did during booking COVID vaccines. I've never seen a department get ahold of software so quickly. But it was great. It allowed you to schedule your appointments. It sent you reminders. It allowed you to cancel them easily. I would ask that the department look at doing something similar for all procedures and make sure we are tracking this key essential data. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member for Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member for Monfwi.
