Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to follow up on my Member’s statement on mental health issues and pose questions to the Minister of Health and Social Services.
My first question deals with patients being released from the Stanton Territorial Hospital’s mental health unit. Mental health unit staff sometimes make it a condition of release that the released patient stay at the Centre for Northern Families, presuming that there are skills and capacity at the CNF to meet the special needs of mental health outpatients. Yet the Centre for Northern Families has only hard-won experience with these people and some space, whereas trained staff, and especially funding, are needed to provide full care.
Can the Minister tell me why our health facilities would place such a condition of release, knowing full well the required capacity doesn’t exist?
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Minister responsible for Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am not familiar with the details of what the Member is suggesting. I would have to assume that was something that a physician might have done, but I will have to get more information from the Member and get back to him.
I appreciate that and I look forward to that commitment. I’d like now to consider the recent instances of outpatients who have gone missing, resulting in the major searches of the community that we have all sadly heard so much about. I realize the judgments for release are difficult and complicated and there can be no certainty in every case, but since we’ve seen two cases in less than five months of massive community searches -- one still underway -- has there been an examination of the wisdom of the practices for release currently being used? Mahsi.
I believe the health authority and the hospital and the unit there do review incidents as the ones that the Member is referring to and I will undertake to get the relevant information for the Member.
I appreciate the Minister’s commitment there. Obviously this is not something you want to see continue.
Mr. Speaker, this leads us to the issue of outpatient readmission, recognizing again the complexity. I know patients who are released, only to immediately go to a return of their drug and alcohol abuse, which are core elements of their mental health illness. Then when requests are made for readmission it’s refused, because substance abuse is deemed to be a behavioural problem requiring referral of the patient to alcohol and drug counselling and treatment. If patients were sufficiently ill in the first place to have been admitted for care, their relapse through drug and alcohol abuse is evidence of continuing serious mental health issues. Could the Minister provide a response either now or again later if an investigation is needed on the logic of this approach?
I do appreciate the Member’s questions and I do appreciate that these are of concern to us. I am a little concerned that what we are talking about here may go into clinical decisions that our health care professionals make by whatever knowledge they have or the legislation or policy, so this is a very complex issue. I think the better thing for me to do is just to undertake to get the information for the Members and provide them with the information.
I do want to say that they are governed by legislation, so we need to get to those. I do share the Member’s concerns about improving what we are doing. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. A short supplementary, Mr. Bromley.
In summary to those questions, the bottom line here is that I, and certainly the public, want to be assured that there is a safety net in practice, and as we know from the child and family services review, there’s quite a difference between policy and implementation or practice.
My last question, Mr. Speaker, very briefly, back to the Centre for Northern Families, which, equipped or not, is delivering mental health services. It is now almost a year since the Minister promised to complete the audit of the Centre for Northern Families, take action on a secondment and devise a financial recovery plan for this important institution. Can the Minister tell me the status of those efforts?
The audit was conducted by Education, Culture and Employment. I have been working with the Minister on that. I do not have the recent updated information on it. I’m sorry. I will undertake to get back to him on it. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Lee. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
