Madam Chair, although we feel at the department that there’s some risk to manage in monitoring and auditing what we’re doing, we need to provide comfort with the physicians that are going to work within the system. There seems to be a groundswell of support to go into the midwives. If we just added the midwives this coming fiscal year in Hay River, it would cost us additional money. If we were to move money within

our midwives plan, move money around, we could move to hiring midwives. But to clearly understand here that we could run into some serious issues with managing risk, we need to have a process, a quick… We will try to speed up the process. We need to have a process where we are dealing with the physicians.

At the end of the day, many of the people that go to midwives choose to have their babies with a doctor. If we are moving into it without this proper consultation with doctors and we are moving into another midwife program or another midwife delivery, then we are going to have to fast-track this process or consultation with doctors, discuss the management of risk with doctors. We will essentially have to drop some of the monitoring auditing of what we are doing, and we have to do a consultation with the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority.

Because there is no board, we will talk to the public administrator and the CEO in Hay River to do this. This will require us to then do some shuffling within the entire midwife budget as we plan to roll it out. It essentially could mean that we will drop what we think is a very, very essential piece of developing this whole thing that is a midwife coordinator at the department level. We want to move through this system to make sure that the midwives and the system are able to stand up to any scrutiny and would be able to also be something that has long-term success.

I recognize that people from Hay River are having their babies in Yellowknife. That has been going on for quite some time. We are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel here in trying to set up a system that is going to bring midwives in what we consider to be a reasonable, coordinated fashion. MLAs are saying that they want us to put midwives in Hay River now. So we will go back and start our consultation process with the health authority, health and social services authority, Hay River and Stanton. They will be involved. Stanton is going to be the people that don’t want to, and that is proven. Fifty percent of the people in Fort Smith still choose to have their babies at Stanton. There is communication between the midwives in Fort Smith and Stanton. Stanton is a territorial hospital. If the people are not comfortable going from the prenatal stage right through birth with midwives only in the room, then those people have to be moved to Yellowknife because we don’t have physicians in Hay River at this time.

As much as I sat here for the past several months trying to explain that we need to move this through in an orderly fashion, it appears as though the MLAs are going to push until we actually put midwives in Hay River. So we’re prepared to warn, I guess, the MLAs that there could be some risk involved here, but at the same time maybe move

some funding around to provide some midwives. I couldn’t really say midwife service in Hay River, but midwives in Hay River. I guess if several months ahead of schedule, if that is what the MLAs want to do… We don’t really know how they’re going to engage into the system at this time. But if that’s what the MLAs want within our current budget, we will look at that.