Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to address a few more questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services about the Foundation for Change and our health reform and what we’re doing in that regard. In some of the Minister’s answers earlier he talked about in terms of health professionals, nurse practitioners and doctors, he talked about wishing to do things, but I realize that the department has a very long wish list. My particular question at this point to the Minister is: We may wish to do these things, but what are we doing about attracting health professionals to our territory? Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We continue to do recruitment. We work with Human Resources to work with each of the health and social services authorities on recruitment. We do have a joint recruitment system. Then once the doctors accept jobs or whatnot, they would then have an option to go to where they wish to go, in most cases. When we’re recruiting for doctors in general, usually the doctors end up here, in the history. We have a website, we are working with a couple of universities in the South where we’re working with – they’re like interns I suppose, but I forget the name, they’re residents I think – referred to as residents that we bring up to the North and they work at the hospitals here to see if they’d like to come to the North. Those are some of the things that we’re doing, off the top of my head. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister. I appreciate that we are doing all these things, but they seem to be the same things that we’ve been doing for quite some time and in order to affect reform in order to make our health system more efficient, I have to encourage the Minister to change the way that we’re doing things and I didn’t hear that in his answer. I’d like to know from the Minister, my statement talked about that Australia uses telehealth to do diagnoses, to talk to patients, to assist them from a distance. I’d like to know what we use our telehealth system for. Just what exactly, what activities, what purposes do we use it for? Thank you.
Thank you. We do use telehealth. We do have patients and nurses or patients and doctors that are in the more remote communities or even in the regional centres, depending on what the issue is, to communicate with the doctors here in Yellowknife if need be. Those are the type of things we’re using telehealth for at this time. We would be able to expand the use of telehealth once the fibre optic links are completed across the territory. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister. So we are doing some stuff, it sounds like; communicating with nurses at health centres and clinics that are in our smaller and isolated communities.
I guess I would like to know from the Minister whether or not that means that we are actually doing diagnoses. Are we able to keep patients and residents in their community as opposed to having them travel to a regional centre?
Some of the telehealth communications have prevented the necessity to use medical travel, if that’s what the question is. In a sense, the doctor was able to assist the nurse or another doctor at the other end of the telehealth screen so that individuals could be properly diagnosed by the person that’s with the patient. In a sense, I guess it has lessened some of the medical travel costs by using telehealth.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the Minister, I’d like to know what we can do or what the Minister has in plans to do to try and expand that use of telehealth in terms of diagnostics. Are there any targets? We probably don’t know how much we’re using it now, but I’d like to know from the Minister whether or not there are any targets that the department has set to expand the use of telehealth for medical purposes.
We would like to use telehealth wherever we can. There is an issue with bandwidth, as well, at some of the health centres in the various communities, but if we can use telehealth, we will use telehealth as much as we can. We will expand the use of it as it goes along. As the health professionals get more comfortable with it, we will be expanding the use of telehealth.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
