Thank you, Mr. Chair. In the
analysis we did, we looked at all of the positions we have supporting the Telehealth program for the whole system of Health and Social Services. The position that exists in the Department of Health and Social Services has system-wide responsibility and participates in things like negotiations with Canada Health Infoway to receive additional funding into the system and so on. It also provides support to staff in the authorities and at the local level, if they have equipment and they need troubleshooting, et cetera. So the position at the department can be written to exclusively provide support from the department to the regions and the local areas or can take a greater role in a particular authority where there’s more need.
We looked at all the positions, but the positions don’t support only one service or one community. They all support additional communities. For example, the position in Inuvik supports all of the communities in Beaufort-Delta and also provides services to the Sahtu.
We did that kind of analysis to see how we could take the existing expertise and spread that out to provide as much support as is needed to all the communities. The other thing we took into consideration is that the kind of equipment we have has evolved, sort of in the same way as equipment related to satellite television. It used to be more difficult to operate and less reliable than it is today. Nowadays the equipment is fairly straightforward, so we’re able to increase the application into small
communities and not provide specialized expertise just to book appointments and turn it on.