Mr. Speaker, this is one area that suffers from problems with recruiting and retaining not only dental hygienists but dental therapists and contract service for dentists.
In Deh Cho region, even though they have a budget allocated for dentists’ visits, they have not been able to fill their contract. There were no operators in
the NWT who could take that on or were interested. They are paying for services from a dentist in Quebec, so they’re hoping to reinstate that.
We currently have only 34 per cent of 11 dental therapist positions filled. There are huge numbers of vacancies, and it’s not an area that lots of people are going into. It’s one that we need to continue to work on, because dental therapists are the ones who provide dental care in many of our communities where there are no dentists.