Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Just to repeat the officials that work with us in this area, and the Member was there with me this morning, the management of our health care delivery system is saying that before we decide and work on details about what to do with Stanton Territorial Hospital, we need to decide what we’re going to do there. What’s it going to be? What is Stanton going to deliver? What do we want it to do? As you know, capital planning is not just about building a
building, because, as the official said, if we just go the way we’ve done before, we’re just going to build based on the old school and as the Member might know, when Stanton Hospital was built 30 years ago, even before they opened the door the building was outdated. From the day it was opened, the building was not designed to deliver the programs that it was required to deliver. We don’t want to make that mistake.
So we want to make sure that we only deliver at Stanton the only acute care services that it can deliver in Yellowknife. As much as possible, we want to optimize the use of the Hay River hospital that’s being retrofitted, the wellness centre and new health facility that we’re going to build in Norman Wells, which is in the books. We believe the Inuvik Hospital is overbuilt and we’re not using it to the max and we want to use that. To do that we need to do the staffing model, the program model, program review, use of technology. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. We are finishing the retrofit in Smith. So, Mr. Speaker, in the interest of doing the right thing and using the money right, we are doing an enormous amount of planning, because when Stanton Hospital is retrofitted we want it to be the modern health facility that does exactly what it’s meant to do and not one thing more. That is that it is efficiently built and effectively used. Thank you.