Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There were a lot of issues that had been brought up. I think most Members have indicated that they will be asking more specific questions as we go through the review. I will try, Mr. Chairman, to just highlight some of the more commonly raised issues, if I may.
With respect to the review of the changes on the supplementary health, I just want to state again that I will be coming forward to the Standing Committee on Social Programs with a timeline and outline and some of the framework for the review. I expect that we will do that when this session is over, if that’s okay. The officials are working on that so that we can have a document starting point and to get the input from the standing committee, and then after that we can move forward with public consultation and more of a back and forth information exchange. I think the past two months have shown that not only we hear from the public, but then there’s information the public will benefit from having as well. I look forward to that situation in that work.
With respect to deficits in our authorities, I just wanted to advise the Members that our health authorities are doing much better this year financially than last year. They are doing much better even than the last detailed report we had back in the second quarter. We are approaching...I think we just got the third quarter results back. All the authorities were asked to balance their budget this year and they had to take on some mitigation
measures, and that recreational therapy position is one of the examples. Last year our accumulated deficit system wide was about $9 million; that’s taking on all the deficits minus surplus. This year we are looking at about $700,000 deficit as a system. Stanton is looking at about $2.2 million deficit this year and the Beaufort-Delta is looking at $91,000 in deficit. Those are projections. We don’t know what’s going to happen at the end of March right down to the penny, but I think it demonstrates that some of the mitigation measures have worked. It hasn’t been without difficulties, because in the health system we need every position and every program. But I think by the hard work that the authorities and their officials have done, we’ve been able to balance and get better numbers doing some hard work but not seriously affecting negatively the programs that we do offer.
Another issue that I would like to speak on is with respect to...(inaudible)...funding renewal. I just want to advise the Members that the Minister of Health from Nunavut, and the Yukon and myself met with Minister Aglukkaq at the beginning of the month, in January, and we had a very good, lengthy meeting, much to the chagrin of all the staff there. We had a very nice northern Ministers’ meeting for about an hour and a half and it was nice to speak to a Health Minister who knew a lot not only about the North, but exactly how...(inaudible)...funding renewal works. We understand that she has to work through the challenges within the federal system, but we are working closely to see how she can help us with renewing that funding; because I think we all understand how crucial that is. It’s about $10 million funding to our budget and we need every dollar and every funding program. We will continue to work on that.
With respect to the programs for small communities on the issue of capital projects and facilities and health care and other facilities, capital projects will be reviewed during the capital planning process. I look forward to having more discussions on that. On providing nursing services and additional services in small communities, the Minister’s action plan, that I hope to come to defend in the Standing Committee on Social Programs, will address that question and others. Because I have learned in my role as the Minister of Health and Social Services that the template that we are following is the ISDM, model, which works well and has worked well for many number of years. But what I am trying to do with the Minister’s action plan is to sort of make a super ISDM- plus, because there is some lack of flexibility in the ISDM in that it states very clearly that for a community of certain size you can have a certain level of staffing. I think that there is not enough flexibility there and I want to build in special needs for some of the communities. Obviously the issues about nursing coverage in Wrigley and
Tsiigehtchic are the most often heard and that is the kind of thing that I want to discuss with the Standing Committee on Social Programs. It is a plan as we move forward. It is a plan about how we could look at our health and social services system differently. It is a completely new action plan that we, the department and myself, have worked on for the last eight weeks. It is not directly related to the board reform work, but I think it is an opportunity to discuss some of these issues. We work to plan for the next business plan cycle.
Tl'oondih Healing Society, I am happy to advise the Members that we have an agreement. I have been working with the Beaufort-Delta authority on this for many months now. The Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services Authority is willing to work with the community and provide the funding to the community, the council of Fort McPherson, directly, where they could hire their own person to provide a counselling service so that they don’t have to have somebody coming from Inuvik and that there would be some flexibility on the programs they can provide There are so many issues here at Stanton.
On the billing issues with Nunavut, we are working on finalizing an agreement with Nunavut where we will have…I learned when I came into this office that there was not a formal agreement on how Nunavut will pay us for the services we provide and how much each service is worth; not all of it anyway. We have an agreement on that where we are expecting to finalize that. We also have had to agree that some of the outstanding amount could not be collected, so we may have to write that off.
The Stanton Territorial Health Authority has gone through some changes in management, but I think they are very stable now. Everybody is staffed. They have a new CEO there. I have not had a chance to get a direct report from the acting PA, who is sitting next to me, with Stanton, because the new CEO there just started about eight weeks ago. I look forward to listening and getting a report from her about some of the things that she wants to do for the Stanton authority and I think her expertise and experience could help us in working through the system.
I just want to…There are so many notes here. I am going to have to just wait until I get all these questions asked back and I will answer those questions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.