Thank you, Mr. Chair. I agree with the Member; it is about safety; it is about quality; and that’s the type of things we are addressing or attempting to address in our Aging in Place Strategy. It isn’t just about beds but it’s about providing services and programs that meet the needs of our residents through their transition from being an individual who is living in their home, to needing supports, to having to go into independent living, to having to go into a long-term care facility where they need additional support and making sure their journey through that aging process is safe and that the programs they are receiving are quality services and our buildings, when they do have to utilize our building, meet the needs.
I’m going to bounce around a little bit.
I saw the pictures that were tabled today as well. Clearly, we know that the Tulita health centre is one of the health centres that need to be updated. It’s actually on the top of our priority list. We have already done a bunch of planning on that facility and we will be moving forward through the capital process to make sure that we have a state-of-the-art facility in that community. We do have a design standard that we utilize for communities of different
sizes, B, C, B/C, whichever the community is eligible for. So, we are moving forward.
In time, as facilities age, we will do our best to keep them up and running and they will reach a point where they need to be replaced, and Tulita has reached that point where it needs to be replaced.
We have standards of infection control and other aspects that need to be incorporated with all of our builds. All new buildings must meet the current standards. If we were to do a major retrofit or changes on existing buildings, we would have to make sure they come up to those standards as well.
Treatment facilities in the Northwest Territories, we’ve had a number of discussions around that. We continue to move forward with our mobile treatment option, which will allow us to use multiple facilities throughout the Northwest Territories and give us the ability to move treatment programs, 48-day type programs to where the people are, in case people aren’t interested in going to our southern facilities or they are not interested in the on-the-land programs. It will give us the opportunity to work with different Aboriginal governments throughout the Northwest Territories, the Gwich’in, the Inuvialuit, Sahtu, Tlicho, as an example. We’re going to continue to move forward in that way.
Medical detox beds you wouldn’t find in a treatment facility. They aren’t located in treatment facilities. They tend to be located in hospitals or health centres. In the Northwest Territories, we have the ability to provide medical detox in our hospitals, so Fort Smith, Hay River, Inuvik and Yellowknife. We don’t have dedicated beds, per se, but we are capable and we will provide medical detox when it is required. If we were to dedicate a bed, we would only be able to use that bed for that purpose, which means it may sit empty for periods of time, so it’s better to make sure that the service is available so that we can provide medical detox in any of our facilities at any time when it is needed by a resident of the Northwest Territories than, say, dedicating that this bed shall only be used for medical detox. We do do medical detox in those facilities that I have mentioned.
I am going to get the deputy minister to talk a little bit about the Inuvik dental situation and then we’ll come back to me, if the chair doesn’t mind.