Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to raise a couple of other concerns. Mr. Chairman, if the Minister might somehow try to address the matter of communication between the community health centres, the regional hospital boards, and then from there to Yellowknife, or whatever institution patients are being sent to, where expert advice is being sought on medical situations for a patient. Maybe I could clarify that for you.
There are many individuals in the communities who are expressing concern that they do not really know their situation after they have been diagnosed. The doctor says, yes, we are going to send you for an operation in Yellowknife. That is the end of it. People in the communities do not know when they are supposed to go, if appointments have been made, they have no idea that those things are being done. For instance, the most recent incident, and I will talk more specifically to the Minister about, was an individual who thought they had resolved a discussion in April of this year, was asked two days ago, by the nurse, what did the doctor tell you? She said, has the doctor contacted you? I always make the assumption that it is going to be the nurse that would contact the patient, and the doctor. If that is not the case, then I think we are in deep trouble because that is not fair to the patient. I would ask the Minister to somehow work this matter out. We talked about this particular issue last week in Inuvik about communication. It is not simply a matter of the communication between the board, and the departmental staff. It is communication with the patients, and the services that they are supposed to be receiving. I have recently received a concern where a patient was supposed to receive a specialized biopsy, in fact, it is a muscle biopsy. The University of Winnipeg has a list and it will be two years before they can even be considered. It seems to me that people do not know what they should be doing. It only came to my attention, and I thought it was interesting that this issue was raised this past April, the last communication from Winnipeg to them was a couple of days ago. Now that is really unfair to the patient. Particularly, since the patient is a young child and has no way to contact anyone the parents are supposed to do that. I raised this point, not to suggest that it is impossible to resolve the problem, but I wanted people here to understand that we have to improve communication with our patients. Our local health centres have to be as much responsible for that communication, as the deputy minister, or for that matter, the regional administrator. You cannot always rely on those two people, or the staff at headquarters, and in the region, to be solely responsible for communication. Those people have to assume some responsibility for that, as well. I just wanted to point that out to you.