Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. So one of this Assembly's priorities is improving access to primary care. Just so everyone's clear, primary care is the first place people go for health advice and care, whether that's a community health centre or a family doctor. So has this government defined anywhere what exactly improving access to primary care means to us and what we're trying to accomplish? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I just want to say, you know, I've had ongoing conversations with the Member and, you know, every time we have this dialogue, you know, there are more things that come to light. And so having these conversations here in this House but also having this conversation with my counterparts last week in Halifax with all of the federal, provincial, territorial Ministers, you know, and saying health care across Canada is changing, and it's not just changing in Canada and Northwest Territories; it's changing around the world. So people having to access care, you know, we're trying to -- we're moving away from the traditional model of having one family doctor for life is no longer realistic. The demands for family physicians at an all-time high right across Canada so, you know, over the life of this Legislative Assembly, our priority is equitable access to health care particularly, you know, we have a high number of non-Indigenous clients who are on the higher end of chronic disease rates throughout our territory. So we are organizing our system so that every resident has access to the care that they need to reach their full health and wellness potential while the system actively works to remove barriers to this equitable access. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. Member from Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Okay, so that's a good start in terms of our overarching goals. But, for example, the primary care reform carried out in Yellowknife, at least, last year seems to have been done as kind of a trial, something we'll try out and see if it works. But has anyone defined what exactly our primary care reform was trying to accomplish and how will we know if this trial has worked if we don't have indicators or targets about what it was supposed to accomplish? How will we know if our primary care reform is working? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the primary care reform is the overall providing of care to all residents in the Northwest Territories. As the Member has stated, in Yellowknife there has been some changes within the program itself. It went from primary care teams of ten, which did not include -- all of those teams did not include physicians on every team. Some of them didn't include community health nurses on those teams. Those teams didn't include LPNs. They didn't include the holistic wellness worker. So what happened was is that there was too many teams spread out too thin and so what they've done now is they've amalgamated the four teams in Yellowknife, and they've created it so that every team has a physician, every team has a CHR, every team has an LPN, there's administrative, there's holistic. And every person in the Northwest Territories, in Yellowknife, that needs to access and is assigned to these teams as -- you know, as they access the care, that they will see the person on the team that is -- meets, you know, whatever their need is so the level of care so that every practitioner there is working at the scope of their practice, they're all professionals in their workforce, and it's not one over the other. And so those that are seeing the physicians are those that are needing to see physicians with the chronic diseases and the complex cases that physicians are working with at their scope of practice. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Minister of Health and Social Services. Final supplementary. Member from Yellowknife North.
So do we have a way of checking in after a year or two years with patients in Yellowknife to see if what the Minister described has actually happened, whether people are able to access the right practitioner at the right scope? So do we have a way of checking in with both patients as to whether it's working well and with the practitioners themselves to see if the theory of how this system is supposed to work is actually working for people at the end of the day? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, every year, I believe, the health authority does quality patient -- they do surveys. So patients coming in, they can take the surveys, they're offered the surveys. There's online. You can call quality risk if there's concerns.
One of the things that we have to take into consideration when we're measuring all of the programs in health, you know, we measure them with our outcomes. And so when we have our statistics, you know, through CIHI, like, we can see whether or not our chronic diseases are increasing or decreasing. The access to physician care, you know, we'll -- we get those updates but to be -- to have the specific detail that the Member is asking for, I can bring that back to NTHSSA to see what internally that they are doing to audit that, the changes in their system, and I can commit to bringing that back to the Members for their review. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. I'll try this again. Member from Yellowknife North. Final supplementary.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So as the Minister alluded to earlier, we need to always remember that primary care is happening in every community, every community health centre across the territory, so how has our primary care reform that's taken place taken into consideration how community health centres operations will be impacted or where the opportunities are for better supports and connections between doctors and practitioners in regional centres and the community health nurses in small communities. How has that been part of the reform process? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I'm glad that the Member asked this question because this is -- this piece here is near and dear to my heart, and this is what the direction as it was given to the department as part of this is reviewing our staffing models in our health centres and not just, you know, our centres that currently have nurses but all health centres across the territory. We have nine communities that have no -- you know, they have a CHR, and if we're lucky they have a home support worker in those communities. We need to be looking at, you know, the incidents of how much, you know, times these clients are having to travel to access services and what the cost is of bringing those services closer. So this review going on across right now with our nursing leadership is reviewing our model of care in our health centres which will identify, you know, the need because in the past, we are working on a federal model, and many of the nurses were put into these health centres, were given housing, were given, you know -- and this is the model we're currently working on. And over the years, we've tweaked it and we've add in home support workers to support, but we need to take a real look at the needs of our small communities and making sure that they're getting the preventative support services that they're needing so that their emergency services are not -- that's not all that they're dealing with. And so that's what's happening throughout. And you know, some of those communities, having access to nurse practitioners, you know, if we can get more nurse practitioners to be working with all of our communities, you know, and then the needs of physicians when they're needed by the residents, you know, that can limit the amount of travel. We all talk about the travel that we're spending on our residents in the Northwest Territories. So this is a whole part of what's going on right now with the medical travel, the, you know, modernization in the health centre and the primary care reform. So there's a whole bunch of things that are kind of working right now that are taking place and hopefully that will help to streamline and strengthen our access to care in the Northwest Territories for our residents. Thank you.
Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. Oral questions. Member from Great Slave.
