Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As you well know, we have a new health centre going into Hay River. We’re hoping later this year that it will be open, and it looks like it might even be a bit ahead of schedule.
One of the situations with the new health centre that we’ve been hearing rumours about for the last year is maintenance staffing may change. With the current health system, we have a hospital and we have our own maintenance crew that takes care of all the maintenance in the facility, takes care of room temperatures and any medical equipment that needs to be adjusted or repaired is done by that maintenance crew. The majority of the snow removal is done by that maintenance crew several
times a day. It’s a high-demand, highly necessary service that we get at our authority.
About a year ago my colleague and I from Hay River started hearing rumours that Public Works and Services want to take over the maintenance of the new health centre. I guess we have some concerns on how that’s going to roll out. We’ve been asking both the Ministers of Health and Public Works what the plan is going forward on this maintenance. We continue not to get any answers on it. We’re continuing to not get any direction.
The maintenance people who currently work there are a hardworking group, and they need to hear what the plan is going forward. These people have lives; they have families that are dependent on their employment situation. They want to know exactly what’s going to happen in the future.
We also know that we need that high maintenance. We need that service immediately. We don’t want to have to put in a request to Public Works and Services and wait for three days to get a response, or even a day later. Some of this stuff has to deal with clinical response time and needs to be immediate. We need to have staffing in the health centre directly for maintenance.
I will have questions for both the Ministers of Health and Public Works and Services later, to ask about where we’re going for maintenance, and we need these answers sooner than later. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.