Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in follow-up to my Member's statement, I have a couple of questions for the Minister of Health and Social Services. The Minister said last week that many of the recommendations line up with work the department is already doing, that existing work clearly fell short in August 2016, instead. What new changes, what new work, will the department act on in response to this review? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I believe it was last October that I tabled that "Building a Culturally Respectful Health and Social Services System," which outlined a bunch of the work that we are doing that line up really nicely with the recommendations that came from the recent critical incident review.
My intention, and I have made a commitment to the family, to the leadership in the Beaufort Delta and to Members of this House, is to expedite that work and to try to get it done as quickly as possible, recognizing that it is a massive piece of work and that changing attitudes and beliefs and the way business is done in the health system that have been ingrained for generations is going to take us a bit of time.
I am committed to doing that work and seeing change. We have already given direction to start digging into the recommendations that are more operational, and we are working on the more foundational, bigger pieces that are about changing the culture of the system. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
How will the department assess the feasibility a piloting of patient advocate in a Northwest Territories community?
At this time, we are not planning to do a pilot of a patient advocate in any communities throughout the Northwest Territories. I know the Member would be disappointed if I did not bring up the quality assurance professionals that we have in the system today. The quality assurance positions are also patient representatives, so they have a double role, Mr. Speaker.
Now, increasingly over the last number of months, it's becoming clear to me that having those two positions as a single position probably isn't the best way to do business here, in the Northwest Territories. Quality assurance tends to deal with situations after they have occurred or where a patient or a client has brought a concern to them that we need to fix, whereas a patient representative, I think, falls more in line with a patient advocate.
That is a person who is there to help the clients navigate their way through, overcome language barriers, understand a system that might appear intimidating or frightening to them. There is a role for that.
So I have already directed the department to look at our positions, the quality assurance/patient representative, see what it would take to separate these out so that we can have those two roles separate and distinct within our system so that those people can provide care. As far as doing a pilot of a patient advocate in a region, that is something we have not contemplated at this time.
I know the Minister answered part of this just now, but I will ask the question anyway. In the absence of a patient advocate, how will the department ensure the service gaps I identified earlier will be closed?
As I indicated, I have already directed the department to look at the possibility of spitting out the roles, our quality assurance/patient representatives, into two separate roles. That wouldn't necessarily address the Member's issue about community-based advocacy or guidance, because that would likely be a regional position.
When I was up in the Beaufort Delta last week, when I met with leadership to talk about the critical incident review, the leader of the IRC, the president of the IRC, indicated to me that they were working with the federal government. There was a pot of money out there that they are looking to utilize to put in some sort of patient navigator for the Inuvialuit. This is something that I am committed to exploring, and I am going to put on my May agenda with Aboriginal leadership this exact topic, so we can have a discussion on how we can work better together to provide advocacy and guidance through the health system for residents in small communities. So I will put that on the agenda. I will work with leadership to find a way to provide those types of supports over time.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Kam Lake.
