Thank you, Madam Chair. Again, welcome to the Minister and the health team here.
I’ve got two broad topics within the area of the directorate here. I’ll start with the first one here. Just to set the lay of the land to the question, we’ve got three health boards that have been dissolved over the years that are run by public administrators. That’s Stanton, Hay River and Inuvik. What’s interesting is that through our budget dialogues, the back and forth that I have seen in the last 16 months, there have been many areas where we talked about barriers to accountability when it comes to the delivery of service to our health authorities. There have been issues in information sharing. There have been issues in risk management, efficiency, the consistency of the delivery of clinical practices, the consistency of delivery of patient care or the seamless patient care. We’ve even seen competition for professional staff within the NWT within all of these health authorities.
On top of that, it was clear and evident through the Auditor General’s report of 2011, which clearly indicated that we had contribution agreements to all these health authorities, we had very few performance agreements to the same tune, which caused a lot of issues for the Auditor General of Canada, and I think it caused a lot of concerns for the Standing Committee on Social Programs.
Given what I’ve just indicated, can the Minister indicate what the future long-term goal, the structure, the governance structure for the NWT health system is?