Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The shortage of doctors at the regional level is an issue, there’s no question about it. We have had a meeting with the Joint Leadership Council. The Joint Leadership Council is the chairpersons and the public administrators of all of the health authorities, health and social services authorities. We have asked them to develop a plan, a recruitment plan for physicians, by September of this year. I’m meeting with the Joint Leadership Council again on June 15
th of this year to get a bit
of an update on how things are moving in that area, and we’re hoping that we’re able to put a plan together that brings doctors to the regional levels. That is doctors into Hay River, Fort Smith, Norman Wells, Fort Simpson and Inuvik. Our first plan, I guess plan A, is to have doctors living in those communities. But history tells us that that’s going to be a difficult task. So far, many years have gone by and we don’t have doctors in many of those communities.
Our second option, as we discussed with the Joint Leadership Council, is to have a territorial pool of doctors, and the pool can be in the regions, as well, or Yellowknife, as opposed to using locums all the time. For example, in Hay River, seven doctor positions in the fiscal year. The fiscal year, I think it’s 2010-2011 was the number that I was using. In that fiscal year, with seven doctor positions, that community of Hay River used 37 locums. It gives you an idea of what the costs must be when you start bringing doctors in from the South and locating them there on a short time.
What we’re hoping to do, in addition to a physician recruitment strategy, is build in flexibility in the physician funding. The flexibility will allow authorities to hire nurse practitioners and perhaps physician assistants. But the mixture – and that’s why we need to work with the authorities – is going to be something that our department and the authorities will work with, to try to make sure that we understand that this is the best mixture to address their physician needs within their authority.
I just want to touch a little bit on addictions treatment. We recognize that addictions treatment is essential in our system. Right now we have one residential treatment that is operating at under 50 percent capacity, so we’re looking at that. We’re also looking at other ways where there will be other treatment, like we talked in the communities about having on-the-land treatment. The health centres, to be specific to Hay River, the new health centre has, right now, 10 extended care beds that are not going to be carried over to the hospital. Extended care is not really a place where…or long-term care. These patients may actually be long-term care patients, and a hospital is not a home.
The intention of our department is to provide homes for these elderly people. Regardless of the mental state that they’re at, they should still be in a home, and a long-term facility is a home for them. A hospital is not a home and it’s very expensive. Hospital space is very expensive space. We want to address that issue, and we’re not going to reduce long-term care beds in Hay River. That is something we are not doing. We are going to work towards making sure that those beds are in Hay River at the end of the day. They’re just not going to be in the hospital.
I don’t know the exact numbers for the language and speech therapy across the territory, but as indicated, we have the 73 locations across 33 communities where individuals can work with people on the speech and language therapy. Sometimes these individuals travel into the communities, the therapists travel into the communities and work with the children. At this time, I don’t know the numbers but we do know that it’s being used in the schools and at the health centre and so on. In fact, when we travelled into
Colville Lake, there was a therapist in the community putting some children through some sessions.
We agree that, as a department, early childhood development is big bang for the buck, that investing in children at a very early age has long-term benefits, major long-term benefits. Minister Lafferty and I attended a meeting on early childhood development and we recognize that. Everyone knows that if you invest money into children early, the earlier you invest, the greater amount of results you’ll have, cost benefits that you’ll have at the end of the day down the road. We recognize that. It’s just a matter of now making that bit of a shift into, I guess, what a lot of the Members have been asking for, is prevention. To make that shift towards prevention. To make that shift towards promoting some early development and funding some early development in zero to three and three to six.
We have a shared responsibility with education and children three to six years old. We have, I think, the responsibility for zero to three and even during pregnancy through healthy families. We’re trying to expand Healthy Families programs right across the North. Right now I think that our expansion from what we have in place, I don’t have the communities, but I know where the expansion is. The expansion on the last budget was Inuvik and expanded to McPherson and Fort Simpson, and also expanding to Liard and McPherson. Those were the two additions to the programs that we already have in Yellowknife, Behchoko, Fort Smith and Hay River. There was a concern that the Sahtu did not have a healthy family program, so we’ve put, again, going back to approving this budget, and then planning in the supplementary appropriation to address the issue of Sahtu not having a healthy family program. We’re hoping that if we can get the budget through and then deal with that appropriation, it is hoped that that appropriation will go through and that we will have healthy family program in the Sahtu.
In prevention and promotion the budget appears to have decreased; that is true. What we have done is we have taken some of the prevention budget and given the prevention budget a portion of it to the Housing Corporation and a portion of the prevention budget sunsetted. That looks like a decrease, but again, through supplementary appropriation, our intention is to put some of that money back in. I’m just going to have the deputy minister speak on seniors population, population health, if that is okay, Mr. Chair.