Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Over the time that I had off over the summer, I got a lot of constituency concerns, and we’re just finishing up our first year – my first year as a Member of the Legislative Assembly – and every time that somebody comes to my office, I always get to learn a little bit more about the issues and the problems that our people are going through today.
One that came up that grabbed my attention was with medical travel. I had a constituent who had had an appointment cancelled because she couldn’t make the flight when the department had booked her medical travel and gave her the notice about two hours before the flight was going to take off. She couldn’t make her appointment, and as a result, she had to wait a whole year to fill that appointment.
Speaking with other people in the community, this is an ongoing problem within the government, and it needs to be addressed in terms of having our people be able to go and get the treatment that they need for issues that they are dealing with. Specifically, when it comes to speciality appointments and they can’t get those appointments rescheduled again, maybe three months, six months and, in this case, a full year.
The government really needs to develop a better process to ensure that people in the Northwest Territories get the proper care and treatment that they deserve and help save the government some money on some patients that go to either Yellowknife, to the region, even down south to Edmonton, and sometimes they find out that they’ve missed their appointments, or sometimes the appointments have been cancelled on them. The Department of Health and Social Services and medical travel needs to find a better process to ensure that our people do get to their appointments, that we’re not having any more no-shows, and that the government starts saving money and that our people get the treatment that they need.
I’ll have questions for the Minister later on today.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
