Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Earlier I spoke about mental health in Nunakput, and my questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services about the NWT Help Line program. Mr. Speaker, my first question to the Minister is: can the Minister provide any preliminary observations from the first night of group phone sessions, for instance, the number of people who called in and if this program has started to positively impact Northerners in need? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, before I get into the details, I just would like to point out that this was the first delivery of this model. There was some advertising for it, but clearly there wasn't enough. At this point, we are not panicked, but we do have to do some more communication. Mr. Speaker, the first delivery was January 30th. We had two people registered. Neither of them called in. At the end of the day, we had nobody call in to that group help line. As I said, we are not panicked yet, but we recognize we have to do some better communication to get that information out there. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I appreciate the response. My second question is: how are these new programs, including group phone sessions and confidential Facebook chat sessions, prepared to respond to unique cultural needs like those of Inuit Northerners?
To ensure that the care coaches -- those are the individuals who actually respond to the calls and are participating in the group counselling -- are ready to work with residents of the Northwest Territories, information is provided to them on a regular basis about the Northwest Territories; the realities, region by region, of the types of challenges that are being faced; the number of suicides; other mental health challenges; as well as some of the community realities so that they are aware of those realities. They also have a number of local resources that they can call in, the health and social services centres, as an example, in order to get additional information on the communities that they are talking to residents from. There are a number of ways that we are trying to make sure that those individuals have some cultural context, some northern context, and understand the realities that our residents are facing when they call in.
The Minister may have answered my next question, but just for clarity, my final question is: what other culturally-appropriate mental health supports are currently available for Northerners across the Northwest Territories?
There are a couple of different things that are happening. One, as an example, departmental staff attended an invitation-only event, We Belong, which is an international forum on life promotion to address Indigenous suicide, in November 2016, which was hosted by the Canadian Foundation for Health Care Improvement. We had an opportunity to go and learn and bring back some of the information from those and apply it to programs across the Northwest Territories.
Mr. Speaker, the department also continues to deliver on-the-land healing fund for mental health and addictions, which goes to different Aboriginal governments across the Northwest Territories. We are of the opinion that those Aboriginal governments and the Aboriginal people are far better positioned than we are to deliver on-the-land programming, so we are providing them support to do that. We have committed to providing technical expertise or resources, e.g. staff, when they request it. We want to be partners, but we accept that it is their design and their implementation.
Then the department has also recently released a report on building a culturally-respectful health and social services system, trying to improve some of the cultural competencies of staff throughout the Northwest Territories so that, when they are dealing with individuals from small, rural, and remote communities, or even larger communities, they understand the cultural context and are able to provide the best, most respectful care and service possible.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Frame Lake.
