Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’re talking about 8-17, the health services administration division. I just want to get clarification because I’m not clear on what page we’re on here.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. We’re on page 8-17. Mr. Hawkins.

Yes, Madam Chair, the funding actually shows up on that page, but the detail of the heading title is on page 8-16, which we deal with together.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will have the director of finance provide the response.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Ms. Mathison.

Thank you, Ms. Mathison. Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you. So is the whole sum total paid out for the staff, or are there other activities associated with the management and administration?

Sorry; did I hear the director correctly, tourism supplies did she say? I was making a note. Maybe if she could explain what that is under this health line. Thank you, if that’s what she actually said.

Okay, there is such a thing as medical tourism, but that’s not what she said. Okay, thank you, Mr. Hawkins. Next I have Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of questions in this section. I want to first talk about midwifery, and we’ve talked a great deal about midwifery in our statements and oral questions in the House, but I want to try and get my point across to the Minister here that I don’t believe we need a clinical coordinator position, which is what is called for in this budget. I believe that we don’t need to do any more planning. I believe that we have the act on the regulations in place which are currently governing the Midwifery Program in Fort Smith, and I believe really strongly that we can hire a couple of midwives and put them into Hay River and start the program in Hay River in 2013-14, as opposed to spending the year and the money planning and start the program in ‘14-15.

I think we do this too often. We plan more than we need to, and I recognize that the regulations may be out of date, but the regulations seem to be doing just fine, thank you very much, for Fort Smith and have been doing just fine since 2005. So I don’t quite buy the argument of the department and the Minister that we need to put money into a coordinator, or to put midwifery into a new community, and I don’t buy the argument of the department that we need to spend a year planning and drafting regulations and policies and whatever. So I wanted to make that statement.

I wanted to also ask a question with regard to the health services administration division. The administration of our health benefits programs is done through Inuvik, the department has located that section of the department there. There have been, I think the Minister is well aware, a number of issues with customer service and particularly with an inability for residents to get somebody to call them back. I understand that often staff are busy, but there have been situations that I am aware of where people either e-mail or phone, and the e-mail is never responded to, the phone calls or the phone message that is left is not responded to. In one situation the resident had to contact me as their MLA and ask me to intervene. For whatever reason, our phone call, the phone call from my office got results within a couple of days, but this person had been trying for two and three months to get an answer out of health services in Inuvik. So I would like to suggest that the Minister needs to look at the operation of the office in Inuvik and try to not streamline it, because I don’t think we need to streamline it any more, but we do need to look at it with a view to better customer service.

My question here has to do with health care cards, and I think somebody mentioned it last week, that there’s always been the perception that we have more people with health care cards than we do have residents in the NWT, and a couple of years ago the Health and Social Services department did do, I think, an audit of health care cards. I’d like to know the results of that audit and I’d like to know if

the current practice of asking people to reapply for their health care card is expected to solve the problem of people with health care cards not living in the Territories. Thank you.

Solve the problem if it ever existed. Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The result of the study, Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The whole issue of midwifery, if we put midwives on the ground, we will do it without working with physicians and doctors that are in place now. We will do it without community consultation. We will do it without educational standards for midwives. We will do it without having territorial standards for midwives. These are the things that we want to put in place before we proceed.

We’re going to get the money on April 1st . We think

that, as people working in the system, developing standards in education, setting up other standards territorial-wide, and working with the physicians on the role of the midwives in the whole system are important. We think it’s important to do some community consultation. We don’t really think we should rush into this. We don’t really understand why there is an insistence that we rush into this and hire midwives immediately. We think that we want to develop a program that will have long-term success, not something that we want to put in place and then try to make it work as we are running through the system.

Right now we have an opportunity to what I think is put a good complementary system in place for midwives that work with the physicians in the system. We seem to be getting a lot of pressure to be able to just hire midwives. We need an opportunity to go through the system, not slowly but in a reasonable time in order to make good decisions with this.

On the health care cards, we are trying to improve the system. We recognize that a few people have had issues in the system as we change the way we are going about renewing health care cards. Instead of sending out forms to individuals, we’re sending out postcards, giving people personal responsibility to fill out the forms and get them into the office and then a new health care card would be provided. We recognize that there are some glitches in the system and that there is some fine-tuning that is needed. We have a systems navigator in place at Health and Social Services that can work with individuals that have issues with health care cards. There is a 1-800 number. If there is an issue with communicating that to people, that we have someone that’s prepared to, in the system, help them with getting their health care cards in time, then we can send that information. We can communicate that out to the general public.

The majority of the time it is not an issue, but as issues come up in the system, then yes, we hope to

address the issues. We are doing health care cards expiring, I think, over the next two years. We have indicated that we thought there might be about 3,000 per month, but it could be less than that, as well, depending on how many of them are expiring next year as opposed to expiring this year.

Madam Chair, I didn’t hear an answer to the customer service issue there, but I’ll just leave it at that. It was a comment.

I did want to ask the department about another change which apparently is in the works and it has to do with recruitment of physicians. There has been some talk about the development of a physicians pool to try and deal with the absence of physicians in some communities; Hay River, for instance.

I’d like to ask the department with regard to this change in our system to go to a physicians pool. Is that something which is still in the works? When can we expect to see that finished if it is? Thank you.

Madam Chair, yes, that is in the works. As I indicated in the House several times, we are making a strong effort with the health authorities to bring doctors to communities where the doctors should be. We are definitely having difficulties getting doctors into Hay River. We are hoping that with the new health centre, plus our work with the NWT Medical Association, we are going to be able to have doctors in Hay River. If that doesn’t work, and if that doesn’t work in any of the other communities where there should be doctors, then yes, a plan B would be to move to a pool within the NWT, a territorial pool where doctors would be located somewhere in the Northwest Territories that could be working in one of the communities designated to have doctors.

Right now the schedule as is, there are nine doctors in Inuvik, of which we have five; two doctors in Norman Wells; two in Simpson, neither of which has doctors living in them; two doctors in Behchoko that live here; five doctors scheduled for Fort Smith, of which we have two; and seven scheduled in Hay River, which we have none. The plan is, once we work with the Joint Leadership Council – that is the chairs and the public administrators of all the health authorities across the territory – then we will develop something such as a territorial pool that would… The territorial pool of doctors would not necessarily be in Yellowknife, but somewhere in the territory. In reality, we could have a territorial pool of doctors, as an example, in Inuvik that would work the Sahtu. We could even have a territorial pool doctors in Smith or Hay River that work in other parts. Like, many of them do come to Stanton to work in Stanton.

An example is of the two doctors we have in Fort Smith, one of the doctors does shifts up here at the Stanton. That would be an example where doctors

would be free to move around within the system to provide a better service for the people of the Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Ms. Bisaro, your time is up. We are moving on now to Mr. Moses, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I had some questions earlier, so there was a little bit of mix-up over on this side of the table here.

In terms of the telehealth coordinator position, I would like to ask the Minister if he can give us just a quick update on how the telehealth program is being administered, and the effectiveness, and how many of all the communities hooked up to the telehealth system are actually utilizing the telehealth services. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister Beaulieu.

Madam Chair, we can provide a general response. I will have the deputy minister do that.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Ms. DeLancey.