Thank you, Madam Chair. On the child and family services review, one of the main recommendations was the child and family services committees in the communities across the territory. We have advised the Beaufort-Delta along with all of the health and social services authorities, starting with the Beaufort-Delta right down to the Fort Smith Health and Social Services Authority, that we are going to start the training component, that they will work on a training component with the communities to start developing those committees in the communities. We’ve had, in addition to that, some discussions at the community level. I’m doing the tour with the department to all of the communities, and about maybe last month, closer to the end of the month we finished a Sahtu tour and reviewed that at the community levels. It looks like it would be feasible for us to do at least three child and family services committees in the Sahtu.
Right now we’re compiling the numbers to see where we think these types of committees would lend a great amount of support to the department when it comes to dealing with child protection. We basically reviewed the children who are receiving services from the department. I have the numbers of the latest tour because I was briefed on it. In the Sahtu we have a couple of communities, one where no children are receiving services from the department and one where one child is receiving services. In the other three communities there’s quite a few. So we were going to look at trying to target the communities that had the greatest numbers of children taking services from the health and social services authorities and we intend to do the same thing right across the board wherever we think that it would be wise to put these committees together, not just to put the committees in where we thought that they should go. I think the initial intent was to put one in every community but we find some communities may not need it.
In the midwifery we are doing a review of the midwife and we’re calling it, I guess, an NWT midwifery review. That review is of the two midwives that are currently in Fort Smith and the
one midwife position that’s in Yellowknife. We think that’s going to save the government money. In Fort Smith, as an example, with the two midwives there were 24 births in Fort Smith under the supervision of the midwives and 26 more births that occurred outside of Fort Smith but were taken right to the stage and for medical reasons or the choice of the mother were sent to doctor’s care for the actual birth. We see that program also will be saving money if the midwives were able to deliver babies at the community level.
I don’t have the information here on the mental health review. I can get that information, I’m sure, fairly quickly and I can brief the Member on that.