Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, advanced care paramedics are equipped with knowledge and skills required to provide advanced patient care in critical or complex medical situations, such as life -- advanced life support procedures, medical administration, obstetric care, advanced airway management, mental health crises, crisis intervention, and much more. If we had these resources available in -- especially outside of regional centres, they could be providing the life-saving services where there are none.
Is the Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs willing to work to bring advanced care paramedic training into rural and remote communities to assist with ground ambulance services in the Northwest Territories? Thank you.
Thank you, Member from Range Lake. Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What the Member is speaking of is an advanced care paramedic and, you know, that type of service for a small community, it may be ideal in some aspects but in the aspect of my department and what the Member is speaking of, you're talking of a service that's done by a community like an ambulance service or a fire department. And sometimes in small communities like that when you have an advanced care paramedic, they have to maintain the scope of practice and in order to maintain that scope of practice, they also have to do so many types of skills to maintain that which is very hard to do in a small community sometimes. So ideally, it's up to the community whether or not they want to bring in those services. They have the funding available. And I know for myself it's been an issue in the past, something I'm still working on with the department of health and continue to work on, on the services that we can provide to the communities and what types of services are needed for the communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the same vein, community paramedicine is an emerging initiative that's proven to be successful to provide safe, timely, mobile medical care in the community setting, such as palliative care, pharmacology, dementia, delirium, and depression services, transfusions medicine, and all manner of things. This helps keep people out of the health care system and gets to problems before they get worse. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Can the Minister work to deliver on this initiative with local emergency services providers to advance community paramedicine in regional centres and in the capital? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. What the Member is speaking of entails a lot of work when it comes down to legislation in regards to the scope of practice or what paramedics can do in the field. And this is something that we currently don't have which would take a long -- a lot of work to do and to get going. My focus, and I think the continued focus, is going to be to continue to support a basic response within communities so that first responder trainer, first responder response to communities are there in the communities and support the communities in order to assist in community emergencies. So when it comes down to the term "paramedics", there's different levels of paramedics, and at this time there is no vision of having paramedics within the communities supported by the government. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Well, I'm trying to see if the Minister will develop a path for this. We could have training programs at Aurora College if they're funded, for example, to offer paramedicine courses. To enhance our ability to do this, we could work with the licensing bodies in different jurisdictions. Alberta comes to mind, to provide certifications, scope of practice, and all the things the Minister talked about. So is the Minister willing to take this on and expand the degrees of paramedicine in the Northwest Territories so we could reap the benefits that are sorrily needed for an overburdened health system and communities that are sometimes completely removed from emergency services and emergency medicine? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think if I had $25 million, I could solve this problem right now. But this is something that's obviously going to take a lot more than that. You know, licensing paramedics, licensing first responders in the Northwest Territories, is something that's been looked at and it's been reviewed a few times; it's been studied. The problem is is when you're dealing with that, you're also forcing volunteers to be licensed which also, again, puts restrictions on volunteers, whether or not they want to volunteer. But it also then turns around to say we're going to charge ourselves essentially to license paramedics. So, you know, this is an added cost, this is an added expense where I don't think it really needs to be. Having worked in the field, I think there's ways about this that could help communities advance. Considering there's only one real -- excuse me, sorry, two full-time services outside of Yellowknife, full-time services outside of Yellowknife, having a licensing is not going to be effective for the rest of the communities. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Final supplementary. Member from Range Lake.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Minister for clarifying that but I'm not asking for a licensing body. I think that is the too larger project. I'm asking if the Minister will explore partnerships with other provinces to bring their licensing bodies to the Northwest Territories to provide this to paramedicine. And I'll point out as well that we have contractors that provide this kind of services in the Northwest Territories. Maybe if we had more flexibility or more range of options, we would see more of those operators open up North and expand the range of services. So will the Minister at least look into working with other jurisdictions to bring licensing bodies into the Northwest Territories so we can expand the scope of paramedicine? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The way it currently works right now with no licensing body, a lot of the paramedics, whether it be a primary care paramedic, advanced care paramedic, or critical care paramedic, if they are licensed outside a province and, say for an example they're licensed in Alberta, when they come work in the Northwest Territories, they work within their scope of practice which most times most companies that hire them allow them to do based on their protocols that they have. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs. Oral questions. Member from Inuvik Boot Lake.
