Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I will just be brief in offering my support to the motion. I would like to thank my colleagues Mr. Ramsay and Mrs. Groenewegen for putting this forward. I know that this motion speaks to the fact that we have an NWT-driven-based solution here to our health care professional shortage that we are experiencing here in the NWT. I think if we just started moving and put more focus on developing an NWT-based pool of locum health care professionals, that would be a really good start.
Just on the small community perspective on the use of locum health care professionals, Mr. Speaker, I don't think all small communities want a full-time permanent nurse that's going to live in the community for 20 years. I have definitely had the experience from one of my constituents where they felt they were just there too long and they just get into a routine kind of thing. I encourage this
government to rotate its human workforce, its human resources, from community to community. I think people always like to see new faces in their communities, not new faces for one month to the next going on forward, but I think that if people that you move around in these pools that are consistently busy in the community every two or three months, I think people would really find that acceptable and would be able to work with it.
So I just wanted to offer my insight into that side of it anyway and say a lot of the small communities do welcome new faces. I don't think going with an NWT-based pool of locum health care professionals...Having health professionals from outside the NWT is not a bad thing. Of course, people from the NWT trained in nursing would be the way to go. I don't think we can build that resource today or tomorrow, but maybe in the future. In the meantime, I think we have to work with what we've got. We are up against a lot of challenges as we go forward with health care in providing health care in the small, remote centres. With that, I offer my full support for this motion. I hope that the government will act in accordance with what we are requesting in the motion, that they start focussing on an NWT-based health care professional pool. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
---Applause