Thank you honourable colleagues, Mr. Speaker. Although the process may not be as comprehensive or documented as it should be, the bottom line is that the Baffin and Keewatin residents will not be at risk on October 1st. There are adequate arrangements in place to ensure there is continuity in service.
However, the review did highlight a number of weaknesses in how these new contracts came about. The two biggest areas of concern are planning and communications. Both the Baffin and Keewatin Health Boards were looking for new, more effective ways of providing services to residents. Their general ideas were good. However, in the Keewatin, there was a lack of formal thorough planning to support these decisions.
There was also no clear implementation plans to allow these changes to happen in an organized way. Planning is also an issue in the Baffin. To this point, there is no formal plan and one will have to be developed in the next couple of months.
With the lack of formal planning, there was also a lack of communication between the boards, the residents and the staff in the regions. The change process would have been greatly aided by regular, straightforward communication on what was happening and how things would change.
Mr. Speaker, it is also clear to me that there is more that the Department of Health and Social Services should be doing in trying to give boards room to make their own decisions. We have moved too far away. While the department should not be overseeing the day-to-day operations of the boards, we clearly have a role in providing support and in providing regular feed-back through an auditing and monitoring process.
I have directed the department to establish the support and monitoring functions, so this type of situation can be avoided in the future. The formal report on this review will be available publicly tomorrow. I will ensure that all Members of the Assembly will have a copy of the report before it is released.
I would like to thank the members of the review team and the many individuals in the north and in the south who contributed to their review. Their efforts have allowed us to address this issue in a very short time and a report will allow us to make some positive changes on how we do business.
Mr. Speaker, as Members will see from the report recommendations, there is work to be done. However, I am confident that both boards are able to ensure today that all residents of their regions will have access to the services they need, just as they did yesterday before the changes came into effect. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.