Thank you. I am going to speak about the airport situation first. The Edmonton airport, I actually have been on the consulting group with the consultant that was hired by Alberta Health Services to look at the triaging at the Edmonton airport. So I’ve had input for the last two years. I was also one of the stakeholders that was interviewed by the Health Quality Council and I’ve added several other people to that, physicians in

our emergency, those working with me on the medevac procedures so that we have a broader input on that one.

But the planning is not just the Edmonton airport closure. Alberta has been talking for awhile about needing to expand its services to some of its other hospitals. Grande Prairie will actually start to take cancer and some others, there are Red Deer facilities and even Camrose will expand, and they’re looking at different procedures between Edmonton and Calgary. So we are already looking at a change to our regular flight patterns and what hospitals are used.

Then the issue of the 48-hour repatriation. This is one thing that they have just advised us of in this past year and also we have to add to that their emergency protocols that have also just happened, because that also impacts the movement. We’re dealing very closely with them. As far as how we can move quickly, there will be a cost, but right now we’re looking at what’s the cost, how’s this happening, and our bed management. Have we got on-call? We weren’t full over Christmas when we really started to see the impact. We are fairly full now. We are triaging from Stanton to Hay River and Inuvik, but, of course, that’s going to be a cost issue for us to start to fly patients to Inuvik for beds.

At this point we’re starting to look at how we’re going to capture these costs that are true costs from this increase, because at the same time we’re already seeing an increase in our bed use and in our medevacs.

Separating out what’s an Alberta pressure from overall is quite difficult. We have actually, I think, made significant impacts on medevac and medical travel, but you don’t see that. What you still see is a deficit, but when I look at the increase around age, chronic disease, some of the other issues that we’re coming in for.

What are we doing about this? We’re working with the CEOs, in particular those three major facilities of Stanton, Hay River. We’re trying to capture quickly what’s the data, what’s the impact in our home care. So far, actually, we’ve been able to manage the repatriation. There’s been some where Alberta has flown back to us but we’ve had a bed without having to move. The real issue will be trying to measure what’s the next level of acuity for home care. That’s going to be more difficult to see what’s the training and what kind of equipment. There are groups starting to monitor the patients. I think it’s quite early because there are so many things coming at us, but it is definitely a work in progress and we’re struggling with how we most easily capture the data that we’re going to need.