Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Minister is challenged with many, many challenges.
Of course, our system is bulging at the seams with all the needs that we want in the communities that we face. As my colleague talked about Tsiigehtchic, it’s no different than talking about Colville Lake. It’s the same situation. It’s a different town, different time, and situations like that. The Health department is doing its best to get into the community from time to time and be there longer than a couple hours or a couple days. Thank God we have some pretty dedicated people that just need to deal with the situation at hand, and those are our community health representatives that, with the limited amount of training they have, they do the best they can until a nurse or a doctor gets into that community.
I want to say to the Minister that our system is highly diversified by a number of communities, the population and the cost of delivering health care into our communities. It’s quite complex in some manner and sometimes that puts a lot of stress onto our nurses in the community, our doctors, even to our people here.
When the Minister made a presentation to us in April, our residents are not doing too well, like in other jurisdictions. The Minister provided us with some key indicators of our population, such as the smoking rates. They’re pretty high in the Northwest Territories. Addiction rates are pretty high, obesity and healthy eating. When we look at that picture, we’re not doing too good compared to other provinces or even Canada as a whole. That means that when we’re not doing too good health-wise, it costs us more to look after our health. The Minister is challenged with that with the budget that they have and the cost of the aging population going up. It costs more now to look after the aging, because we want our elders and seniors back in our communities, or we have to send them out to Yellowknife here where sometimes they come to the Dementia Centre. It takes money out of the system to look after them. We have some opportunities to see where we could improve on our efficiencies and our sustainability and to look at how we do cost management of this issue here.
One of the things that the Minister has talked about is the government system. He is meeting with the leaders to look at this issue. I applaud the Minister, because he did say that this will not take away from the Sahtu authority or some control on our health issue. We’re looking at some things where we could do things together and put some money where it’s needed. The money where it is needed, the Minister has acknowledged that the top priority throughout the North is addictions and mental health issues. That’s what he said to us in April. That is the top priority. I want to ask about this business plan. What are we doing about the addictions and the mental health issues in the Northwest Territories?
The Minister had taken a trip with me in the Sahtu. We looked at the cancer issues in Fort Good Hope, and the Minister had talked about this work here and not only in Good Hope but in other communities that also have a high rate of cancer. We want to look at the early screening program of cancer. Right now we are catching them at the latest stage where it is too late. There are people already, as I speak, that are impacted and affected with cancer in the Sahtu. We need to have some support for the survivors of cancer for the families. Good Hope talked about this. When they come back to their communities, we need to work with the families with the grieving issue. There’s a lot of sorrow in our communities. Kids especially carry the sorrow for a long time, even adults. We are not properly processing our grief. It stays within us. Even that causes other medical health problems for us, but especially for children. I’m looking for support for that.
The Minister is also tackling the issue of electronic telehealth. That policy could be one factor that could cut down some costs in our health care system. We want to see where that is strengthened and improved.
The Minister and I, when we went to Deline, they talked about palliative care service in that community. They want the elders back in that community. We have nine elders right now that have come out of the Sahtu that are in Yellowknife. The same thing with Inuvik, places that we need to bring them back and let the Minister, working with his colleagues, look at getting the long-term care facility in the Sahtu underway. The Minister answered some questions of mine last week here. We are looking forward to having that facility up and running and bringing our elders back. Too many of our elders have died outside the community. That’s not good for our people. Deline I know has asked if they will look at the potential of some of those units opening so they can have some of the elders being brought back to the community so they can die among their people. That’s what they want.
I know in Norman Wells and Tulita there is going to be possibly an impact of resource development. We need some help in many areas to see where the department can come and work with the communities and with the Sahtu Health Board. I already talked about the dental services. That’s something that I really look forward to the Minister to see how we can get a proper dental program going in the Sahtu. Too many people are leaving with an abscessed tooth, fly here and Inuvik and getting their teeth pulled and getting fixed. It’s too dangerous. We need to get some proper dental service in the Sahtu.
This is the last of my comments here. The Minister has also talked about the doctors and the nurses and how we work with those. We have a solution
made in the North. It’s called a Nurse Practitioners Program. I want to see if we can continue to support this program. These nurse practitioners are graduating. I’m not too sure if there are jobs waiting for them. If not, we should be having jobs waiting for them. We just had a class graduate. I want to know how many nurse practitioners have a job, and how many left the Northwest Territories or are they staying around here waiting for a job. Is this program going to be on again next year? This is one of our solutions that we have here. These nurse practitioners work in the North. They help us and are a valuable service to our health system.
I want to close off by asking the Minister, through some of this business plan, where do we look at the community health centre. I know they had some funding in the community to do some planning for a new health centre, amongst other projects that the Northwest Territories is going to be dealing with. The community health planning centre money was somewhere in there. I want to see where it’s at. It will have to line up with the other projects that we have already for the North here. We have to come to that decision when we deal with it.
All in all, I do want to say to the Minister I really appreciate himself and his staff coming to the Sahtu, and listening to the people and making some commitments to our people in the community. I look forward to going through the business plans with him this afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.