Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Madam Chair. You know, this telehealth videoconferencing, video services, televideo, it has helped in the small communities. I think Behchoko is one of these telehealth and onto the smaller communities eventually. I'd like to ask when are we going to foresee the communities with this equipment lined up? I'm hoping to see all communities are lined up. I realize the infrastructure because we have wireless now, high speed, in the communities. It has been completed just recently. So I'm just wondering, I'm sure that was part of the plan and when can we see the communities up and running? Mahsi.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the way we work this program is through drawing down the federal dollars and that would be the THAF, or the territorial health fund, and we'd draw that

down. So we're unable to draw down a large chunk so that's why you see it. In 2007-08 we'll have five more communities hopefully established and we'll continue to work it as we can draw down those funds. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Lafferty. Okay. Ms. Lee.

Thank you. I have a question on the two items under professional development recruitment and retention and program delivery support on this page. They both speak to nursing issues at the hospital. Sorry, not the program delivery support there, but patient care services. For patient care services in 2005-2006, there was $90,000 allocated for that but we haven't had one for last year and this year and it says that in 2005 and 2006 it was funding to Stanton Territorial Health Authority to conduct a review of the configuration and utilization of nursing services and that's very interesting in light of some of the things I was talking about earlier where I really believe that we need to put more focus and attention on how their nursing staff are organized. I just want to know if the Minister could tell us what the review was and what was the finding of that and why, and is there need for doing more there?

On the recruitment and retention, we are seeing an increase of about $800,000 since 2005. We're spending $2.2 million on this front and I would like to know if the Minister could give us some progress report on how we are doing and how much of that resource is going into taking care of the nurses that we have online with us. I don't want to point out just to nursing students and new grads, I think there's a need for focus in all stages of nurses that we have in our system. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, under the patient care services, that money was identified for all of our four hospitals and three have been done and Stanton is to be done. We do have some funds internally to complete that process. For the actual detail of that, I'll have Mr. Parker give detail on that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Mr. Parker.

Thank you, Mr. Parker. Ms. Lee.

Thank you. There was a second part to my question on the recruitment and retention, if the Minister could answer that. But further to his answer to patient care services, why was it that only the other three hospitals had this review done but not Stanton Hospital, and what were the findings of these other three studies? What does the Minister seek to obtain from this project? What's its goal, what are we to use with that and what's to come out of that? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Parker.

Thank you, Mr. Parker. Ms. Lee.

Thank you. So then could the Social Programs committee ask to have a discussion on the result of that review and I am still waiting for the answer on the R and R. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We will provide that information to the Social Programs committee and gladly sit down with them once that review is complete, or we can even do the first three facilities that we've worked on.

On the recruitment and retention services, it's broken down into a number of categories and when we talk about our system-wide recruitment initiatives for the $2.273 million, we have $208,000 identified for recruitment and retention services; $15,000 for planning evaluation development; northern development contributions, $10,000; recruitment and retention contributions, $20,000; physician training, $24,000; speciality nurse training $56,000; entry level nurses, that's the Intern Program, $1.032 million; the nurse mentorship development costs, $10,000; advanced nurse mentorship is $230,000; entry level social workers, and that's interns, $150,000; and then we also have support to authorities for about $40,000.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Ms. Lee.

On that note, are these monies spent on hiring extra people to support this, or how are they spent? Maybe in the interest of just focussing on one area here, I heard at one point $32,000 for new grads or interns. So what are we doing with this money exactly? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Roland.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The money is through contributions to the health authorities and to help them with dealing with the growing pressures or dealing with hiring some of the nurses. Some of it is development programs with internal use, but the large amount for interns as we see, as well as for the mentorship for example, is to help the health authorities

with nursing staff in the mentoring side, but the biggest is professional development, PDF. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Ms. Lee.

Thank you. On that, as I stated earlier, Madam Chair, we really need to review how we are seeing these nurses through the process because everyone is involved. I mean we have expectations on the part of the students that are being trained to be nurses and waiting to get into the employment market. I think they have certain expectations about where they want to take their career and what kind of work they want to do. Then when they get into the workplace, they expect to have a lot of support I think. So it's known when I graduated from law school I had to have a lot of training and work under experienced lawyers to make sure you learned what you need to know and also to prevent you from getting into mistakes, huge mistakes. I think it's essential that we use whatever we can to provide these new nurses to have the support they need, but what I also see is that mentors are burnt out and I think I heard the Minister say that the allocation for the mentors is $10,000, whereas there's about $1 million for the new nurses. You know, all the nurses that I talked to are overworked and they have to do a lot of overtime, they can't always take the time off for holidays, it just seems that there's more and more being expected of them.

I just think we need to say that we're doing all these things, but we're just not paying enough attention to how they play out on the ground. I think when I hear concerns from the nurses entering the market and the nurses who have been there for 20 years, I think that the issues may be systemic and I would like to know if the Minister could undertake to review how we are using this R and R resource and have somebody look at it and see if there's any way to do this better, because I just don't think we're meeting the end result of what we do with our educated nurses and then trying to keep them reasonably satisfied about the career choices they've made and the working conditions that they have to go through everyday. Could I get the Minister to undertake that? I don't know how he can do it. I guess I could leave it to him to decide how he's going to do it, but this is very important.