I’d like to know from the Minister when that was sent. My concern is that, and I’m kind of following up from the discussion that I had with the Minister earlier today with regard to housing and facilities for adult disabled residents who need supervisory care, assisted living and so on. I didn’t get a sense from the Minister that this plan has any specific buildings or facilities identified for that sort of care. I guess I will wait until I see the plan to ask further specific questions, but if the Minister could advise when that plan was sent to committee and, I guess, also if the Minister can advise if there are any facilities in that plan scheduled to be built for assisted living. Thank you.

Just to answer the Member’s first question, as the Member knows, we did have a prior briefing on this and we did send some documents that the Member has asked for. I believe it was sent in an electronic version and I’m assuming those were made available. If not, I could make that available to the Member.

Secondly, I know what the Member is asking. I think she wants to see right in front of her how many beds in how many communities, in what communities, in what year for the next 20 years. I think what we need to discuss about long-term care. We know that the Department of Health along with Public Works has completed a long-term care facilities review that gives us a plan to go forward on where the population projections are and what the requirements should be for long-term care.

When we are talking about long-term care, we often think of seniors’ care, but it also includes institutional caring or facility caring of people who cannot be taken care of otherwise.

But what I also need to tell the Members is that there are other ways of taking care of residents who need assistance, and a lot of that work is being done in Yellowknife already. We may not know it, but there are many streets in Yellowknife where there are group homes and they have them in other communities in a limited sense. My point is, there is more than one way of taking care of those residents who need assistance.

There is never enough space. There are always people on the waiting list, and how fast we move on that is a question of resource. That’s what we do every year, is to try to find money as the Legislature, to see how quickly we move that and how much budget we have allocated for them. The way to do that is to have a needs study, and we have just finished that needs study. It’s something that we need to work together on. The institutional setting is the last resource, I believe. Going forward, we want to put less and less people in these institutions. What we want to do is to be able to support them in other ways. I can undertake to provide the Member with how many beds we have in different communities to help persons with the need for assisted living that are not necessarily in institutions. Thank you.

I wasn’t necessarily asking for institution. I’d like to know if the Minister is referencing the capital needs assessment, the 20-year capital needs assessment. It’s a summary of all departmental needs. If that’s the document the Minister is referring to, yes, I have that, but I had understood her to be referencing a facilities needs study just for Health and Social Services. Could I get a clarification on which document she’s referencing? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, that is the one I was referring to. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I have to ask the Minister what that one refers to. Is it this document which I have in my hand, which is labelled Summary of Departmental Needs, Capital Needs Assessment, 20 Years, Five-Year Capital Planning Process? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I will do my best to answer questions. I will get back to her on all the documents I gave her. We gave a bunch of documents to the committee. There might be some breakdown in communication. Whatever she needs, whatever I have, whatever I can give her, I will give her.

In terms of long-term care facilities needs study, the Member knows that the department just finished looking at long-term care needs of the Territories

for the next 20 years. We talked about the need to review that every five years. That was part of our discussion in the Standing Committee on P and P and Social Programs when we reviewed the capital plan. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. I think the report that was being referred to was the report in regard to the review that was done by Public Works on the infrastructure of the department. If you can get that report, great. Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess I will have to figure out what document we’re talking about there.

My concern with the capital needs assessment for the capital planning process is that it only looks at existing buildings, and my concern is with the need to fill in this gap for assisted living as there is no indication in this document for any accommodation of persons who need assisted living with supervision.

I agree with the Minister that institutions should be the last place that people go, but certainly there should be some planning, in my mind, for homes, whether they be homes that are owned by Health and Social Services or owned by the Housing Corporation, and programs are run by Health and Social Services. But I don’t sense that we have a plan to deal with that anytime in the near future. Just a comment. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m done.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Next I have Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a quick question on the small capital replacement, the evergreening sorts of things. This is sometimes a cumbersome process to put it through this sort of capital planning. Is there some thought to going to a routine evergreening process where we don’t have to examine each microscope being replaced, so to speak, please? Thank you.

The Minister of Health.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The current process is that we are part of the, sort of, replacement of small equipment, under $50,000, is it? Capital? But we are working to see if we could have a separate category for medical equipment, because they have different requirements and some of them are urgent. If something goes wrong, we need to be able to replace them, because otherwise our people do need those machines to do things or to do diagnoses or whether it’s an X-ray machine or… Anyway, we are working to separate that and come up with a different evergreening process for medical equipment, and I do really appreciate the support and the feedback that we’ve received from Members. Thank you.

That’s really all I had. I look forward to that coming forward and I certainly would support such a process. Streamlining would be appropriate here. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Next I have Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a quick question in this area, health services programs. I was wondering if the Minister could advise if there is any planning study scheduled for the replacement of the health centres in both Fort Resolution and Lutselk'e.

The Minister of Health, Ms. Lee.

Thank you. As the DM mentioned earlier, we have reviewed every health facility in the Territories in the last year. Many of our facilities are over 30 years old and I can advise the Member that Fort Resolution is one of the ones that needs major renovations. As well, Lutselk'e is one that needs to be looked at in short order. It will be part of the next cycle of planning studies going through the process in the next two or three fiscal years. Thank you.

I just wanted to know if either of those two health centres are actually scheduled to a point of the planning study through the process. I see that there’s planning studies that do occur and then following the planning study, usually the following year there’s a determination of whether or not that’s something that should be replaced within that year or the next year or the year after or whatever. So at this point I’m just looking for the timing of the planning study for the two facilities.

As we’re all aware, we’re dealing with the capital plan for ‘11-12. The resolution planning study is up for next fiscal year as soon as possible, because it needs to get on the books. We are dealing with a land issue there and we know our review of the facilities show that Lutselk’e needs to be in the cycle by 2015.

Now, I can’t speak for what would happen for the future Assemblies, but our studies have shown that Lutselk’e is one of the five Level B facilities that needs to get into the next stage in the planning and the capital plan process. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, am I eligible to ask questions from the next section, community health, or do we have to approve the page first?

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. I think we will complete this section first before moving onto that, community services. So I have next, Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My question to the Minister is: I was surprised to hear a comment today, or a question of the Minister earlier today, in regard to long-term care facilities where

we have residents from Nunavut in long-term care in the Northwest Territories. I’d like to know if there is a situation of number in the Northwest Territories, an increase in the numbers of elderly care, especially in long-term care facilities. Can the Minister tell me exactly how many long-term care residents in the Northwest Territories are in the system from Nunavut?

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have the numbers on me right now, but some of them were ready before division. It’s not huge in numbers, but we have a few. So I will get back to the Member on the numbers. Thank you.