Thank you, Mr. Speaker. During the summer our local paper ran a story about Allisdair Leishman, a young man who stabbed himself in the Stanton Territorial Hospital’s kitchen. Requiring the proper long-term care and concerned about the lack of physiotherapy care the young man wasn’t receiving, the mother, Mrs. Leishman from Kakisa, took to the paper.
In essence, in the article Mrs. Leishman alludes that her son was limited to two hours per month of physiotherapy care. Upon my office’s investigation, it was verified that the Stanton Hospital was fully staffed with eight physiotherapists. It appears that only one physiotherapist provided care to in-patients. On top of that, according to long-term care requirements of the Stanton Hospital website, it clearly states that the average PT care is two hours a week, and not two hours a month, as cited in the article. I know I will have some general questions to the Minister on this one later today.
The overarching issue here today is not the Allisdair Leishman situation, although tragic and sad, but it does lend to the issue of priority care for rehabilitation patients. This situation does nothing more than prove that the current system is failing, forcing many patients to seek therapy outside the hospital and sometimes travelling down south for services.
Ultimately what we are seeing is the improper prioritization of non-acute outpatients versus care for hospitalized in-patients. We could address this simple principle. We could conceivably provide more services if we just prioritized fewer acute clients.
Case in point, even during filling out an outpatient services form for clients – which I will be tabling later today – one can clearly see that WSCC patients are given urgent status over in-patient care. Upon further investigation, this urgent status also affects patients of DND, RCMP and auto insurance, in which these classifications receive more urgent status than in-patients with long-term care needs.
What is the solution? I say the solution is relatively simple: Prioritize your patients. That is, make sure your long-term care in patients who need this care most are taken care of first, before we deal with less urgent outpatients.
I will be asking this simple question to the Minister of Health later today, and further to that, I hope that this exercise will propel a much more thorough review of the entire NWT rehabilitation prioritization tools, as these evidence-based tools are being used as standards in jurisdictions worldwide. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
