Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. The Minister reported on statistics yesterday, in response to oral questions, that outlined some really horrible wait times for diagnostic and specialist medical services. She did report that our volume of services has gone up. I’m happy to see that, but that still leaves too many people waiting. She made a reference to our wait times being the same as down south. Again, I want to discourage in this, as well as in the supp health question, trying to be the same as the rest of Canada. We expect better. So what are we doing now to reduce these backlogs to zero? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The honourable Minister of Health and Social Services, Ms. Lee.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The point of saying that our rates of wait time is similar to the rest of Canada, that is just showing the challenge that all jurisdictions in Canada face, and to stay similar to the rest of Canada, actually we are making really good effort on the part of all the people who are delivering those services at Stanton.
Mr. Speaker, to give the Member more information, the CEO of Stanton and other CEOs actually, because we’re working at a territorial plan together, and all of the medical directors in each health authority, Doctor Corkal at Stanton and Doctor Claude and Doctor DeClerc, all the medical directors in charge have been working for months together with the department, to come up with a plan to reduce wait times. As I indicated to the Member earlier, I am planning on announcing that soon, when we have it in place. But, Mr. Speaker, we are working to reduce the wait time.
Lastly, it’s important for people to know that our physicians examine the people on the list constantly and if there are any emergencies or urgent cases, they are dealt with accordingly. Thank you.
Thank you. Last fall the Minister announced the launch of the new website, the recruitment and retention website, hopefully to overcome some of these chronic problems of staffing our professional and specialist vacancies. So I’m wondering what monitoring is being done, what the results are. Can the Minister tell me what progress is being made as a result of that and whatever other efforts the department is taking to decrease our vacancies in our medical staff and specialists? Thank you.
Thank you. I could follow up on that, Mr. Speaker, and give him the latest information coming out of that website. I think what’s important to note is reducing wait times for some of these procedures doesn’t necessarily have to do with the vacancy, because for those procedures, we have our staff in there. If there is nobody permanent there, we have locums in place. What we are trying to do is we need to have a team of specialists, whether surgeons, internal medicine specialists, nurses, supporting staff, they need the space to make sure that they do the job they need to do as quickly as possible, and that’s the team approach that we are working on. Thank you.
Thank you. The Minister had mentioned the wait times and wait time standards, per se. We don’t have such standards. That seems odd to me and a slippery slope. If we don’t have standards, of course we’re going to continue to allow those to slip and slide without correcting them, and obviously they need correcting. So I’m hoping the Minister will actually put those standards in place so we can prevent that.
I’ve repeatedly asked the Minister to say whether analysis is being completed on the increased cost of administering a co-payment system, and this information has never been supplied. I’ve spoken about, in my statement earlier today, the four in a row fumbles and rebounds of my constituent’s prescription cost claims to Inuvik, which could be a prophecy of what lies ahead. I’ll ask again, has the Minister completed analysis of what the increased administrative costs will be? And since she has not met with the Pharmaceutical Association and others, how can she know what key burdens this will place on our front-line providers who have a bottom line to meet? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, the plan is that once a decision is made as to the implementation of this policy, we will be going for RFP to find a service provider such as Blue Cross or any other insurance companies. They are equipped and trained and set up to deliver a program like this. They do that for our other existing GNWT program, as well as the GNWT employee program. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Your final question, Mr. Bromley.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I will speak more on what those costs were and, of course, the lack of progress we’ll be able to make on reducing our costs, given the complexity of what the Minister is currently proposing. Mr. Speaker, I’d like to have from my last question, how are we encouraging Metis and non-aboriginal residents to get and maintain third-party supplementary health insurance? It’s a pretty straightforward question and I don’t think it was answered when my colleagues asked that question. If we don’t currently have the answer to this, which I assume to be the case, not having received an answer to a repeated question. And that may just be a fact: we don’t know what the answer is. Do we intend to fill this gap, given its potential to again negate any hope of achieving cost reductions with the current plan? How are we going to encourage third-party insurance? What mechanisms are we putting in place for Metis and non-aboriginal? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In all of the, I believe, written material that’s been on the website, the presentations made in public meetings about supplementary health benefits, we have stated that NWT residents receive supplementary health benefits in various ways by all kinds of different third-party insurance. NIHB is a third-party insurance. MHB is a third-party insurance. Employer health insurance is a third-party insurance. People who have private insurance, that is a third-party insurance. And supplementary health is trying to address these people who don’t fall into any of that, who don’t have any of those. That is who we are trying to help. So that’s what we mean when we are saying third party. Third party includes NIHB, MHB and employee insurance. Thank you.
The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
