Thank you, Mr. Chair. With respect to planning for long-term care facilities, I believe we had shared with committee the continuing care review that was completed that was based on demographic projections from the Bureau

of Statistics. We are now working, actually, in partnership with Avens to update those projections to make sure that, as we support them in their Aven Pavilion project, we do have the most up-to-date projections and then that will inform our plan that we’ll finalize for the capital development of long-term care facilities.

With respect to standards for long-term care facilities, over the last couple of years we have approved continuing care standards. We have approved a long-term care staffing model and received forced growth funding to bring our existing long-term care facilities up to date. We are developing a Falls Prevention Strategy for our long-term care facilities. As the Minister noted, we are working on a palliative care action plan, planning for long-term care beds. We’ve worked with the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation to ensure that if they develop new independent living units there is provision for adult day programs. We continue to roll out training and what’s called a Supportive Pathways Approach, which is really the contemporary philosophy for how we should respect the wishes of elders that live in our facilities to make their own choices about what they do on a daily basis. It is a fairly new way of looking at things, so there’s a lot of training to be done in that. We’re working with authorities to roll out the new continuing care standards. We have a couple of authorities that are piloting some innovative approaches to working with elders in the community to delivering home care and foot care programs. We’re monitoring those pilots to see if there are things that can be extended into other regions. Thank you, Mr. Chair.