Thank you. I’m going to invite my deputy minister to add details, if she feels they’re needed.
I think we’re mixing up a whole bunch of programs here. First of all, I want to say, because I received an e-mail from a student who was I think offended, maybe she was, that I was suggesting... She thought that I was suggesting that a graduate out of a Nursing Program from Aurora College is not ready to be a nurse. That’s not in any way what I meant. I think what we’re talking about is being practice ready. In any profession, whether you’re an engineer, lawyer, doctor, nurse or whatever, you learn certain things from school, but the practice at the community level or a hospital setting or public health or home care are a little different and we
need to make sure that we support them through that. Of course, the nurses that graduate out of Aurora College are qualified to be a nurse. There is no question about that.
We facilitate our nursing grads through a Graduate Employment Program and our government is committed to facilitate them so that we recruit and retain as many of those grads to work in our communities in the North as much as possible. They’re going to be asked to give a preference of communities but they may not get to work exactly where they had asked for. But we are committed to hiring them anywhere in the Northwest Territories.
Community nurses, CHN is one program, but if given the right support and resources and mentoring we may be able to accommodate new grads into different authorities. That’s just everyday work that the department is engaged in.
The other thing we should keep in mind is that what Aurora College provides has to be in line with what the health care system needs. We provide funding to HR and ECE to deliver these programs, but I think it is totally acceptable and expected that we review these programs to make sure that people we train are in line with what jobs are required. As I said earlier, the Foundation for Change action plan has a vision for more home care workers and home support workers and resident aide workers. Those are really good community-based jobs and counselling programs. There are lots of human resource needs that we need to marry up between the Department of Health and Social Services and Aurora College.
We’re also aware that in the next three years we’re going to be graduating about 70 to 80 nurses. I think it’s reasonable to think that maybe we have tapped off on the number of nurses that we can hire and then we need to look at other programming. We’re saying, my deputy minister and Education and Aurora College, we’re going to review all of our training programs and see where, not all, but the programs that we are providing with our own money and make sure that we’re training the people we need.
I’m sorry for the long answer but I think it is important. We are looking at all aspects and we are committed to funding to 2012 and we need to work on where go from here with those training programs. Thank you.