Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a couple of things. One is to do with the Home Care Program and not necessarily for Yellowknife, although I'm a big supporter of this program and I think it's a great program that needs to keep on going. What I do want to speak to is with respect to home care positions in small communities.
In our pre-budget tour, and I don't want to mention any communities or names because I don't want to get any employee in trouble, but I was quite startled to find out that, in fact, there is a half-time position in small communities. I can understand how some communities are so small that they may not be able to have full-time home care, but surely there's a lot of programs being provided by this government in similar areas of social services per se, or health and social services. I just think having a part-time person, or just somebody being a half PY, does not provide the kind of job security necessary for that person to really get committed to a position. Even if this person was from that small community and this person will be there for a long time, this is a person that the whole elders or everybody who is in need of anything relies on, and obviously this person was working a lot more than part-time hours. I'd like to ask the government to undertake a review of the manpower that they have, or the womanpower that they have, in their communities and see if they could somehow combine the work there of related fields to make sure that wherever possible, that all of these positions are full-time. Because I think that full-time positions, unless, of course, somebody wants to work part-time, but in most cases where this person was quite young, very ambitious, she's gone through three to five years of training and she desperately wanted to work full-time, but there was just not enough work there, but not enough budget money, but I'm sure there's enough work there for her to be full-time. So I'd like this department to undertake a review of some of the conditions in small communities and what part-time positions they have, and whether or not they are like similar programs that they could combine to make it into a full-time position. It could be half social work and half home care for somebody; half-time nurse and half home care or something so that
the persons could be employed as full-time wherever possible.
The second issue that I want to address also is something that's already been addressed a number of times in this House. That's with respect to recruitment and retention of health care professionals with specific emphasis for retention. I think that we would go a long way in addressing our health care professional shortage if we could just keep what we have, and I'm not sure if the government is doing enough to keep people who have moved here, or who are from here, who have been trained into positions. I don't know if we're doing enough to keep them in the field and in the North. I think the Minister is aware of some questions I've posed to his office about people that are under the Maximizing Northern Employment Program where northern born, northern trained health care professionals are being left to wonder year after year whether they will be able to get a full-time job, even though there's a lot of need for health care professionals and people trained in that area.
So as long as I have been here, there have been questions asked about doing exit surveys. I was watching the Olympics over the weekend and there was a commercial by Johnson and Johnson, and Mr. Johnson, one of the Johnsons, was on TV saying the reason why they are the best company in the world, or one of the best, is because they ask their customers about products they make and the only way you can improve and know whether you are producing products that work for people, and whether or not you are satisfying their needs, and whether you're performing well, is by asking the customers. For the life of me, I don't understand why we cannot have an exit survey. Make it mandatory. The Minister could make that a policy right now. Some people may be leaving for all the good reasons. They may have to transfer for family reasons; they may be leaving the field or whatever; but there might be some other information there that might be helpful to improving our retention programs for us to learn more about what we're not doing well in, or what we could improve on, especially for Stanton Hospital.
I have to tell you, I've said before that I'm getting the sense that the human resource issue there is not as challenging as it had been years back, but I think the challenge is still there. I still do get phone calls from staff there from all different departments at all different levels about human resource issues. I could say that I get more calls about human resource issues out of that hospital than anywhere else. Perhaps we had that issue with the North Slave Correctional Centre and this government addressed that by having a special project person, reviewing the issues and one of the things they did was to do a survey. I remember being briefed on that survey about employee satisfaction and what's happening and just learning from the employees themselves about what's going on. I don't understand why we can't apply the same thing to Stanton Hospital. I'd like to ask the Minister if he would conduct a survey at the hospital and report to the Social Programs committee about what the findings are, and whether he would institute an exit survey requirement, a mandatory exit survey to all of the health care professionals. Thank you.