Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to keep the Minister of Health and Social Services jumping up and down from sitting to standing and ask him some questions.
I spoke about the need for a Health Information Act in my statement, and I’d like to ask the Minister, considering that we are increasingly using electronic medical records within the NWT, and considering we have an increasing number of complaints around the privacy of patients’ info regarding medical records, whether or not… I feel that this government does not recognize the importance of adopting legislation to protect residents’ privacy relative to health records. I’d like to ask the Minister what priority does a Health Information Act have in the department’s legislative agenda.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Health Information Act is top priority for the Department of Health and Social Services, and we would be hoping that the bill will be ready for introduction in the 2013 fall session.
Thanks to the Minister for that update. I guess I would like to ask the Minister, he says he hopes that it’s going to be ready by the fall. Normally committee receives some indication of what the bill is going to contain in advance, so can the Minister advise when committee is going to get some indication of the content of this new act?
The act will go through the regular process. We are targeting the fall 2013 session. I did say hopefully that will happen. Provided nothing goes sideways, we’re expecting that the bill will be provided to committee prior to that, at the appropriate time prior to the time that it’s introduced in the House in 2013, the fall.
Thanks to the Minister. I guess I’m having trouble. The Minister of Health and Social Services is starting to sound like Minister Miltenberger and talking about the fullness of time.
Committee will have to wait with bated breath for this information, which may or may not come in the fall, and I do hope that it does.
A number of jurisdictions within Canada do or are currently now… They’ve either gone through a review or they are currently going through a review of health, of health information acts.
I’d like to know from the Minister whether the work that we are doing on our Health Information Act is looking at what’s going on in other jurisdictions and trying not to reinvent the wheel.
I will assume that the Territorial Electronic Medical Record Project Team will be looking at best practices across the Territories and then put the information together for the act, and also that they had also reviewed all of the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendations, and through the review they have addressed the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner pertaining to this area.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the Minister, that’s a great segue into my next question. I was going to ask about the recommendations in the Information and Privacy Commissioner's report, and the Minister has advised that these have been considered. But the Commissioner also advised committee when we met with her that the health authority has not accepted all of her recommendations and has not made the changes that she recommended. Can I ask the Minister why not? Thank you.
Yellowknife Health and Social Services has responded to the information, the Commissioner, of privacy concerns. If certain recommendations in the report that the health authority did not agree with, that may have been the reason that they have not responded to every concern, but every concern that was put out there where the health authority felt that required a response or a change, that has been made. Thank you.
Thank you. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
