Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Earlier I spoke about dental issues in the North and how I wanted to find out more about how dentists are funded to go into the communities.
I’d like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services if he can give me a little bit of information on how dental services are provided to the smaller communities. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The Minister of Health and Social Services, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As Mr. Menicoche indicated in his Member’s statement, dental services are not an insured service by the Government of the Northwest Territories. However, we do work with the dentists, and the dentists go into the communities.
What happens is, during the year the dentists have a program where they’ll contract with the various authorities, and based on those contracts, they contract a certain amount of days that they are to be in each community, and then they are paid according to the amount of days they would spend in the communities. Then they do what they can in the communities just for the dental services, not for therapy and stuff like that.
Like I indicated, the health was transferred in 1988, and it seems like some of the health care is being provided by non-insured health services. Maybe the Minister can just explain about how that is still a federal service and why we’re not taking care of that.
I think that some of the acts of the dentist have to be revamped. Some of the acts are very old, so we are looking at revamping the Dental Profession Act at this time. Although the dental services remains a non-insured service, the department does get support from the federal government through the THSSI funding, or the Territorial Health System Sustainability Initiative. They provide us about a quarter of a million dollars in this area to pay for the dentists to go in there.
The specific details of why it was not included in a complete transfer in 1988, I don’t have that specific detail here with me today.
I’m not too sure. I was just quick to listen about the particular report that was on the news this morning and that the dentist had spoken about. It addresses that there are shortcomings in the smaller communities, shortcomings in providing dental services, as well as dental awareness.
I’d like to ask the Minister if the department is doing enough in this regard and what is his strategy going forward in improving these services in the smaller communities.
The Department of Health and Social Services is working with the Government of Nunavut and the Government of Yukon developing a pan-territorial oral health strategy. We are doing the oral health strategy because of obvious reasons of health and all kinds of positive impacts. Within that health strategy, we are going to do an oral health promotion and prevention. We have listed many programs that we are looking at and together we’re hoping that, as indicated in the report, the only jurisdiction that had worse results than the Northwest Territories dental-wise was Nunavut, and we are working with them and the Yukon to see if we can develop something in the area of prevention in order that we turn that around. It starts before babies even have teeth, so we’re starting right from scratch in trying to develop a strategy that we think will be effective.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I submit one more time that I think one of the better strategies is to increase the visits, increase the number of days of service to the smaller communities. I’d like to ask the Minister if he will take that into consideration and look at that in his overall strategy. I believe that’s one of the musts that we should do.
Yes, I agree that some more visits by dental staff will be a good part of the oral health strategy. However, I think filling all of the dental therapist positions is also another strategy that we need to employ, and we’ll certainly look at the possibility of increasing visits as we did in other communities that requested that there be more visits. We will again talk to the dental people, within the bounds of our contract with them, to see what is possible.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
