Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I want to talk about health care which is clearly a priority for Members here although perhaps we have different areas of top concern.
It's our largest operating budget. And to be clear, a lot is at stake here. Much more than money. It's a matter of preserving lives and taking care of people when they're suffering the most and providing a sense of security for our families, as Mr. Nerysoo was just describing. But it should alarm us that NTHSSA has been bleeding money since it was established with an accumulated deficit of at least $200 million.
Now, I have many health care professionals in my riding, and they tell me that the system is in danger of falling apart. I know that health care is huge and complex, and there are a hundred sides to every story. We are often told that health care systems all over Canada are strained, every jurisdiction is underfunded, everywhere they're struggling to hire enough doctors and nurses. And we're told that young people might not want to work full time anymore, they want a travelling lifestyle, so we just have to accept that agency nurses and locum doctors are inevitable. But I don't accept that there is nothing we can do.
What I know is that the foundation of any health care system is our staff. It may be unrealistic to aim for all fulltime stuff and we may always need to fill in some gaps with temporary workers but without a strong core of resident health care professionals, the system collapses. The good news is that we seem to be doing well at recruiting new resident doctors and nurses who do actually want to live here, but our retention is dismal. The burnout rate is high. What I hear from health care staff is that they are exhausted and overwhelmed. They are frightened and demoralized by the prospect of decreasing standards of patient care with too few staff per shift. They're constantly being asked to work overtime and come in on their scheduled days off.
Salaried nurses work alongside entry level agency nurses who could be making twice as much money as them. Doctors, even those who want to live in the NWT, are quitting and becoming locums because they are fed up dealing with an administrative system that seems more interested in policing them than in supporting them. And perhaps in an attempt to find cost savings, NTHSSA has increasingly been going to arbitration with staff, fighting over their access to benefits
Member from Yellowknife North thank you.
Unanimous consent granted
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So in trying to pinch pennies, we are costing our system dearly. Increasing hostility and miscommunication between staff and administration lead to a downward spiral of morale and an increasing spiral of costs.
Mr. Speaker, we need to put resident health care professionals at the centre of any strategy moving forward, to communicate clearly with them, to find out what they need to avoid burnout, to treat them as partners in designing a sustainable health care system. Thank you.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements.
