Now I am ready. Thank you, Mr.
Chair. I just wanted to start by saying I
understand how difficult the Minister’s job is. Health is one of the most complicated departments there is. Certainly it’s one of the ones that costs the most money and is the hardest to deal with due to national and international shortages and wildly increasing costs in delivery of health care. I also absolutely respect everybody in the department. I have worked with a lot of them. I have seen a lot of them at work, and I know they are incredibly hard-working individuals and deserve a real pat on the back, as do all the people in each of the health authorities: all the nurses, all the doctors. Without them, we’d have nothing.
But there are still challenges. I mean, I guess the fiscal reality is in what’s going on out there. There are places that are obviously working a lot better than others, and I’ll give you an example. The Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority has gone from being in rough shape several years ago: no nurses, couldn’t find staff, running deficits — pretty bleak out there — to the point now where they are pretty near fully staffed on a regular basis. They’ve got a lot more permanent nurses in the community health centres than they have had in a really, really long time. Things seem to be going pretty good out there. They’ve gone from being the authority that used agency nurses more than any other agency to being one that hardly uses agency nurses at all. So of all the authorities right now, they really deserve a nice little clap on the back.
The reason I’m bringing that up is because I know a lot’s being done out at Stanton right now trying to find some streamlines, to try to find some efficiencies without reducing the quality of the services that are being provided. I’d like to take this opportunity to encourage the Minister and hopefully get her to commit to working through her public administrator at how some of the other authorities are running and to go out to places like Sahtu. I understand it is a completely different business given they are community health as opposed to a hospital, but there are efficiencies they are finding out there.
I think it is time that Stanton looked at some other alternatives, some other ways to deliver their services in efficient ways to gain those efficiencies and ensure that services continue to be delivered in an efficient and effective way.
One way I would also encourage the Minister to consider — and there seems to be resistance to
this one, which I don’t always understand — is the value in creating some redundancy within the hospital itself. We hear a lot about the payroll. We hear a lot about the cost escalations in payroll and whatnot, but there would be some real advantages to at least pursuing and seriously considering, with an open mind, the concept of creating some redundancy in there. By that I mean creating some additional positions in Stanton, some additional nursing positions that would be on duty on a regular basis, that could be used to cover factors such as when nurses either call in sick or are away on annual or are away for any other variety of reasons, including training and development. Redundancy would cost you less than overtime and save the authority money over time.
I guess what I am asking is for the Minister to commit to exploring these options with an open mind, not being closed off to them right off the top, and working with your public administrator — who I respect very much and I think was a very solid choice — to look at some of these options, including what’s being done in other authorities such as the Sahtu Health and Social Services Authority.