Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question is for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I know we graduate nurse practitioners out of Aurora College but I’m learning from constituents that we are actually hiring those nurse practitioners into regular RN jobs rather than nurse practitioner jobs. This is sort of following up on my colleague’s for Hay River North questions. We need to make good use of these nurse practitioners. What’s going on here?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The positions of nurse practitioners are needed in the regional centres where they’re able to perform their full nurse practitioner jobs. Nurse practitioners are brought in and educated to become nurse practitioners so that they can be out in the field and providing much needed relief like physician-type of work. The nurse practitioners, when they end up wishing to remain in Yellowknife, do end up as registered nurses on many occasions because they have doctors in Yellowknife. I think seven of our nine nurse practitioners are located here in Yellowknife.
I don’t expect the Minister to have this information immediately at hand, but I wonder if he could provide us how many nurse practitioner positions there are in Yellowknife, in the regional centres and in other communities that are vacant at this time.
Just from memory I do believe there are two larger communities that have nurse practitioner positions. One is filled and the rest of the nurse practitioner positions are actually located in Yellowknife, but I don’t know how many of those are actually earmarked as nurse practitioner positions, off the top of my head.
Thanks for that immediate info. I appreciate the Minister’s response there. I wonder if the Minister could just confirm that and give us that information for each of our regional centres at least, including Yellowknife. The added aspect I’m interested in is the number of nurse practitioners who are hired in the Northwest Territories and where they are who are not in nurse practitioner jobs. I’d like to find out what the size of our resource is that we’re not using very well, for whatever reason, then we can explore that.
Yes, I can provide that information to the Member and the House.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
