Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Further to some of my written questions that I received from the Minister of Health and Social Services on people that are leaving the hospital after being taken there for self-harming as well as being intoxicated, or under some type of substance issue and concern, I have been doing a lot of research and a lot of efforts in communicating with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse that’s based out of Ottawa and finding what’s the best research that we can have up in the Northwest Territories and in the North with our unique situation with all the isolated communities, and they gave me a lot of really good information. I just want to let them know that I appreciate the hard work, and the efforts and the support that they’ve given me in this battle and all the stuff that they showed us and I’ve been bringing to the table, got me to look at the Mental Health Act, start asking questions, written questions. It is a big issue here, especially the detoxification.
With the discussions that I had with the staff at the CCSA, they mentioned that detoxification is a fundamental component of any treatment continuum. In fact, it’s actually recommended that detox before treatment, and the reason you go through detox and the reason I fought so hard to get the beds, was during detoxification you can evaluate the person, you can look at the person’s unique health needs and life situations and look at their culture to see what kind of cultural needs they’ll have. Then you can look at the community resources and do the best plan of action for the treatment that they might need.
I also talked about whether or not RCMP were trained in terms of the Mental Health Act, detoxification, all these questions and a lot of gaps that we have in our system, both, I believe, in the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Social Services. Speaking with some RCMP officers over the last week, some of them did say that there is not a big training component on the Mental Health Act and that they would like to know what provisions they could fall under to make sure that they give these people the right support. The partnerships that they have with the hospitals is that they take the patient to the hospital and once the patient gets any kind of treatment, then they go back in the cells. There’s no nursing care and no follow-up during that time. A lot of gaps and I will continue to follow up. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
