Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Ms. Mathison.

Thank you, Ms. Mathison. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for that information. I think I understood that and it explains why some of the other divisions

are doing so well. Just on the Minister’s comment that these have O and M dollars associated with them, I would assume those dollars would not be reported under compensation and benefits.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Abernethy.

No, they wouldn’t.

Thank you, Minister Abernethy. Information item, directorate, active positions, page 8-15. Agreed?

Thank you. Moving on to page 8-17, activity summary, program delivery support, operations expenditure summary, $46.490 million. Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a number of comments I want to make here, or questions, I guess. The first one has to do with the system human resource planning division. It’s been a while now since the recruitment of health professionals has been moved back to the Department of Health and Social Services. I’d like to hear from the Minister or from the department whether or not they’ve done an evaluation of how well it’s working to have that function back within the department.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister Abernethy.

Thank you, Madam Chair. One of the priorities of this unit has been since we’ve brought them over from the Department of Human Resources is to review the existing programs and services they are providing and start putting together a long-term strategic human resource plan for health professionals within the Northwest Territories. That work is still underway and we’re hoping to have a draft strategic human resource plan that we can bring to committee to have a discussion about things that we need to do and things we need to change. There are a number of areas in programs that we have delivered in the past that don’t appear to be providing much value as far as recruitment and retention and it’s time we make some improvements, and I look forward to an opportunity to have further discussion in this particular area and our strategic plan, our human resource strategic plan as we move forward. This unit has been very busy and there’s been a lot of work on what was there and where we need to go and it’s been less than a year.

Thanks to the Minister. I have a comment with regard to health card renewals. Some months ago, over a year ago I guess, it was a huge issue and there were major problems with health card renewals. Interestingly enough, I haven’t heard many comments from my

constituents, certainly within the last six or eight months, but just recently I had somebody who phoned and left me a message, didn’t really want any action but wanted me to know – and I’m sharing this with you, Minister – that his health care card, he had just discovered it had been expired for a year and he had no knowledge. Now, I thought we were sending out notices, so where are things at in terms of health care card renewals? Do you figure that we’ve gotten over most of the hiccups? Obviously not this one, but is the system working better than it certainly was when it switched over?

Clearly, we had some growing pains as we rolled out this new approach on renewing health care cards. We do provide notification to people. We are limited in providing it to known addresses and if people move or they change their post office boxes, we may occasionally miss an individual. I don’t know the situation you’re describing and if you want to share the details with me, please, so that we can insert it into our quality assurance process to make sure that we learn from it and make sure that that type of thing doesn’t happen again. I would say that we have experienced improvement since our initial rollout and we are getting health care cards turned around in a more timely and reasonable manner.

Thanks to the Minister. I’m not sure I can give you the info. It was pretty much I want you to know this, but I don’t think I’ve got enough detail that I can share with you to help you figure out what went wrong.

There is money in the budget for midwifery. I didn’t know if that was the Minister who said that or if that was in the budget address, and I’m very glad to hear that. My understanding is that it’s going to put, at least I’m thinking it’s one midwife, but one or two midwives in Inuvik in the 2014-15 budget year. If I could get confirmation on that, and if I could hear from the Minister where we’re going next after Inuvik.

In my response to some of the opening comments I talked a little bit about the midwifery services. We are doing a minor renovation to the existing Hay River Health and Social Services Authority, which we believe will allow us to move forward with the Midwifery Program sooner than anticipated. We had some limitations given that the current facility doesn’t meet the needs, and we are expecting the new facility to meet the needs, but we’ve now got a coordinator hired in the department who is doing the work for us, so we’re actually anticipating we’re going to be moving forward more quickly with the Hay River position, the two positions here, right away. We actually have gone out for staffing on those midwifery positions in Hay River. We’re hoping to do some interviews in the immediate

future, so hopefully, we can get that up and running pretty quick.

The work on Inuvik is more around sort of setting up the system in Inuvik to make sure that all the stakeholders are aware we’re moving forward with that. We plan to fill positions in Inuvik, should everything move according to plan, in the ’15-16 fiscal year.

Staffing Inuvik is ’15-16 is what I thought I heard. My other question was where are we going after Inuvik? Where is the next area that a Midwifery Program is going to be put in place?

According to the territorial plan, Hay River, Inuvik, Yellowknife as a territorial program.

Thanks to the Minister for that confirmation. I wanted to make a comment to the loss in this year’s budget of the money for oral health care. It was $468,000, I believe. I know that this was federal money, but I think the Minister heard from the Social Programs committee that this is something which the committee considers to be really important, a basic prevention program for young children. I know that the Minister has said in I think it was in his response to people’s comments that there is a plan for oral health, that we’re studying what we’re doing and we’re going to have a plan sometime within this next year. I do have a problem with that. I think that the $468,000 that we have been using for oral health has been but a drop in the bucket of what we need to do with regard to our young people’s oral health. There was a very telling comment from one of the department staff at a briefing, which stated that, I think… I wish I could remember the percentage, but it was that something like 80 or 85 percent of children under the age of five have at least five cavities. That’s huge, and we know very well that dental health is part of whole body health, and a child with poor dental health is going to be a child in poor health in other areas as well.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. I will circulate the motion. The motion is in order. To the motion. Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I kind of shot the wad previously before I introduced the motion. I would just like to state, in terms of where the money

can come from, I know the department is consistently strapped for money and I know the Minister said, as well, that we don’t know what the federal money is going to be eligible for, but I suspect we can make oral health care fit into something that the federal government is going to require us to use for this $7 million a year.

I really feel this is a minimal amount of money and I feel it’s basic to the health of our children. It’s a very basic prevention tool we can use. I would urge everybody to really think about what this is going to do for us, the amount of money that it is and the fact that we do have “$7 million of new money” coming to us this year some time. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. To the motion. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you. Very briefly…

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