Thank you Mr. Chairman. This is a big and important topic, so I am going to ask the deputy minister, who is also public administrator for a couple of authorities, to elaborate.

But before I do that, I just want to say that you will see from the debt figures that the debt amount, the trend has stabilized somewhat over the last couple of years and also the Member does have a point in saying he believes some of the authorities are underfunded. That might be true, but as a system we need to be able to justify how so, not look at the whole thing but we need to be able to break it down to see where is it funded or not funded in a correct way and then what can we do as a system, what changes we need to make to change the way we are doing things. Because I would think that not only as a Legislature here, but as a Cabinet Minister, if you are getting a presentation from the Department of Health and Social Services about where we really think the deficit lies or the reason for it, we need to be able to establish and come up with that blue chip information, which is what we have been working on.

So I am going to ask Paddy to highlight some of the findings that she has had and she is working on, because I think in a year and a half I believe that we are coming to a time where we will have a lot more clear picture than we ever had before. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Lee. Deputy Minister Meade.

Thank you, Ms. Meade. Mr. Abernethy.

Excellent. There’s still a little bit of time on the clock too. Thanks for that. That’s all good information. I’m happy to hear that. There are some areas that I don’t hear much talk about and I’d like to hear a little bit more from the Minister or the deputy minister on this area.

Under this area we have hospital services and NWT health centres. Now, there’s certainly one thing that crosses over that, and that is nurses. We need nurses in hospitals and we need nurses in health centres. There’s still an international and national shortage of nurses in the country and around the globe, and as a result, we have in the past had significant use of agency nurses where we hire the nurses that are identified by the agencies, we pay them a salary based on our Collective Agreement, but then we also pay a finder’s fee to the agencies who happen to have identified the nurses. I’ve seen those rates and they range anywhere from $90 a day to $450 a day.

I’m curious how many agency nurses that fall under this category were used in 2010-11. Actually, you know what I want? I want the department to give me a summary for the last five years on agency nurse usage, how many agency nurses we’ve utilized, how much we paid in salary, but also how much we’ve paid in the top-up, the fee to the agencies. I also want a bit of a summary on nurses that we’ve hired as locums or backfill in community health centres and the hospital over that same period. Those are the ones that we hire as employees that we don’t go through an agency, and there are some that we have in our own relief pool, I know that too. Can I get those two breakdowns so we get a bit of a sense of what this backfill is costing us?

The reason I’m bringing it up is I think that’s an area where we need to find some efficiencies. Agency nurses are just really expensive and a necessary evil now, but what are we doing to break that dependence from the agencies? I think that could save us some money that we can reprofile back in, but also creating some stability in the communities with respect to community health nurses.

Now, we had a really great program, in my opinion, Community Health Nurse Development Program, which wasn’t used in 2010-11, or at least to the capacity I think it could. What are our plans for those types of programs in the future? I think those should be expanded as opposed to cut back. If we truly want to get northern nurses back into the communities, we better make sure they have the skills to go in there. So I want some information on that as well.

And while we’re here, once again, just go back to Hansard and re-read everything I said on broadband because I think it fits this section as well. So I want some statistics on what the agency nurses are costing us, what our locum nurses are costing us, and what we’re doing and what our plan is to transition away from our reliance on this model when we’re training nurses at Aurora College and we’re having larger and larger grad classes. What are we doing to break the model of our dependence on agencies and locums?

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Minister Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There was a lot there that the Member has raised so we will have to get back to the Member with more detailed information.

I haven’t seen the latest information on agency nurses, but the last stats I saw, I believe, showed that it is something that should get a lot more positive light on. We have substantially reduced the use of agency nurses by a huge amount. That was, I think, the latest stat about six months ago. I need to get the information for the Member, but over the last three to five years we have substantially, 60 to

80 percent reduction in agency nurse use. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Next on my list I have Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to say to the Minister, in terms of the health care services in our small communities and some of the equipment that I’ve seen, now it certainly shows that there’s a great improvement to the health centres. There’s actually some equipment there that’s beneficial to the people and their residents. I really want to thank the Minister for putting those in our communities. It makes a big difference when we have people come to our health centres on an emergency basis and there’s actually equipment there that’s being used by our nurses now. They’re very appreciative of that equipment going into our centres now.

I want to ask the Minister when she’s doing the health care planning facilities, is there anything in there in terms of the health centres that we have in the Sahtu; specifically Colville Lake? I know right now they don’t have any running water or they have no proper, I guess they call it now, washroom facilities. It’s still back into the honey bucket system there. Is there something in the planning system that would advance it to a capital infrastructure when they’re looking at health centre funding? I wanted to ask the Minister in that respect.

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Minister Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t have the information here on the capital and I don’t know where exactly Colville is, but I will look into that. I can tell you that as the department we’ve worked over the last fiscal year to put more focus on some of the small equipment that has fallen behind in the line-up using the regular process, and my colleagues have been positive in responding in that regard so that we can address some of the equipment issues in the health care system. Thank you.

I certainly look forward to seeing what type of information the Minister can provide to me. I know we’re in operations and maintenance expense budget and I’m not too sure of where it fits in terms of operations and maintenance of the Colville Lake Health Centre there, our nursing centre, in terms of what I’m asking for in terms of the planning or to advance it to funding for capital expenditures, and if that’s something that should be at another table here. I look forward to whatever the Minister can give in terms of how do we improve that health centre there to where now they’re going to have running tap water and use of a proper facility, a flushing toilet rather than the honey bucket system. I think we need to move out of that era there and bring it up to the modern society. Thank you.

I hear what the Member is saying. I will undertake to look to see what we have for capital items for Colville Lake, but that’s not part of this budget we are dealing with here, so I do not have that information readily available. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I certainly appreciate that from the Minister. I know that another area that I need to talk about and because this is an operation and maintenance budget, I have...(inaudible)...in terms of at least the planning of the operations and maintenance. Anyhow, I won’t get into the details.

I want to tell the Minister that if they had a hospital or services that I saw firsthand in Edmonton... I appreciate the Territories have a staff person at our hospital. She was very helpful with some of the stuff I had to deal with. It sure does make a big difference when you are out looking at things that we need to take care of. She was there. I want to say that the money is well spent in that area in terms of who we had down there and how this person helped out of our Territory’s hospital. The person was a good thing for us. I just want to commend the Minister and the department on that person here. I just want to leave it at that. I have no other questions.

I appreciate his comments. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Lee. The next on my list is Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In listening to some of the comments provided by the deputy minister of health, she mentioned that there was a zero-based review on Stanton. Could she elaborate a little further and even if it is for my benefit if I didn’t hear her give the answer? My question is specific. What year was the zero-based budget review done? Is there a copy of it that can be provided to Members? If so, can I have an electronic copy? Thank you.

Minister Lee.

Mr. Chairman, it was started before I went into office. It was completed, I believe, around that time, three years ago. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister Lee. To Mr. Hawkins’ second question about getting a copy.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That information is not a public document. There was not a formal report per se. It was more of an internal working document as to where the money was spent. It was basically a budget document. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Hawkins.

Mr. Chairman, can I request a copy of that informal document? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I will see if that is available and whether or not it can be made available. Thank you.