Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. I’m aware that the Minister and his department have been doing some very good work on reviewing a lot of files within their mandate and I’d like to ask the Minister if he could put in some context either the number of clients or the kind of money that we spend as a territorial government to support clients that require southern placement at this time. Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I actually can’t remember the exact number of clients that we had in there. I actually just talked about it a couple of days ago when we were having our budget dialogue, but it is about 100 adults and about 100 youth, give or take. We know it’s incredibly expensive. During the last round of supps, I asked for $2.5 million for youth and another I think it was $2.5 million or $2.6 million for adults. So there is a significant cost. There’s multi-millions of dollars a year.
I take the Member’s point from her statement where we need to dig into these files and review them and see if there’s any opportunity to repatriate and I’ve already directed that the department do that. They’re going to do a file-by-file review and where there are similar clients with similar needs and there’s a business case for repatriating a block of them, it’s something that we’d like to explore and I’m certainly willing to work with committee on that. Thank you.
The number of clients in southern placements, adult and children and the types of placements that they are in, I understand, are probably fairly varied, but I’d like to ask the Minister, and I know he hasn’t been in the department that long, but at his first analysis on maybe a high level, is there anything that jumps out, is there anything that stands out that may be a type of southern placement that could be repatriated to the Northwest Territories? For example, in Hay River we have the assisted living facility. A lot of the clients in that facility were in southern placements prior to this. So, is there a type of care that initially stands out that the Minister could identify where we, as Northern communities could think about accommodating? Thank you.
My initial discussions with the department, we’re looking for a similar type case where we have individuals with similar needs, but we do know right now that there’s a huge variety of residents in the Northwest Territories. We have some residents who require 24/7 care with multiple individuals and others that are more in the independent setting, but require significant medical supports. So at this time I’m not prepared to say that we have found a catchment, a group of individuals who have similar challenges that we may be able to repatriate up here, but I have directed the department to do a case-by-case review. As we do that, we’ll start to be able to see what, if any, similarities exist and where an opportunity exists we will certainly be having that discussion with committee and I hope to have the information available. We expect it to take about a year to do a review of every file. Thank you.
That was going to be my next question is when we might begin to see the results of the review of those files to see where there might be some economies and would make some sense to a business case scenario and, also, we know there’s a human factor to this, as well, to bring some of these folks home.
In the interests of decentralization and the fact that there may be communities out there that would be interested in accommodating, whether it be a group home or an assisted living facility or maybe something even more specialized, how will the results of this work be communicated so that if there are communities who would like to express interest in being involved in a plan to accommodate these folks, how will that be communicated in such a way?
Before any decisions are made, we do need to understand the caseload, the client load, and the individuals that may be able to be repatriated. I intend to share that information with committee and we can have a discussion on what might be the most appropriate location and how we, as an Assembly, decide where we want to invest our dollars, remembering that we want to keep people as close to home if we can find a way, and we have residents from all over the Territories, so there might be multiple opportunities here.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary. Mrs. Groenewegen.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That is exactly what I wanted to hear. There are opportunities, I think, for regional facilities and that would accommodate keeping people closer to home and it would also maybe create the need for smaller-type facilities but more home-like where possible. I really don’t have any more questions.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Just a comment. The Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
