Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the
nurse practitioners who do their return-of-service with us, our first priority is to place them into a position that is defined as a nurse practitioner role. We have a whole contingent of people working together to define how that role can be implemented into the authorities. We continue to work on that.
Certainly, it is our intention, when a fully trained nurse practitioner comes to us, to be able to utilize the full scope of practice they have, and we would place them into positions to be able to do that if we could.
We’re really maxed out in Yellowknife in terms of existing nurse practitioner positions, so we would have to work with the authorities to re-profile existing positions if we were going to allow additional nurse practitioners to work to their full scope here. But as the Minister stated previously, we have many opportunities for nurse practitioners to work to their full scope of practice outside of Yellowknife, and they would then not put their certification at risk.