Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the motion brought forward by my good colleague Mr. Norman Yakeleya, the MLA for Sahtu, and I think it’s very timely. It’s not just a personal experience he’s gone through. These are experiences we are hearing time and time again. Some of the challenges have been brought to my attention, even as of late, and it’s unfortunate, sometimes an experience like what Mr. Yakeleya had personally, all of a sudden it becomes a lightning rod for people all of a sudden to wake up and go, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s happened to me,” or these are the types of things where, you know, the northern culture has been, whereas people have kept to themselves and sort of accepted sort of sometimes the bumpy road and just said, “Well, I’ll put up with it. I’ll put up with it.”
But this issue is on the radar right now and it’s got people phoning in. Recently, I’ve spoken to a constituent, in particular about the medical travel issue and their experience through it, and certainly their family and relatives and the trials and tribulations that they’ve been challenged with and, you know, I mean, the motion speaks loud and clear itself, but I’ll speak to some of the areas they drew up for concern. I know these are areas that are being worked on. I shouldn’t be remiss on that; I need to emphasize that. I know medical travel is complicated. It’s never been an easy beast to wrestle down and solve and it’s one of those things that it’s very expensive. Let us not kid ourselves that medical travel is certainly an amazing benefit, but it’s an important one and represents the values and type of people we are and we feel it’s that important and this is why we need to do a good job. If we’ve committed to do this process then we’re obligated to do a decent job, and that’s the gap right there where I think we expose for fault or failure or liability, whereas in the system itself it has agreed this is what we’re going to do.
It’s funny, that type of commitment is kind of dangerous because when folks finally get through the medical travel gauntlet of approval, whereas their doctor made recommendations and they finally agree that, yes, everybody’s agreed that you require medical travel, even in non-emergency situations, but it’s the same in emergency situations as well. Then it’s, like, what do you do. The family waits. The patient waits. Whether they’re waiting by themselves or waiting to find out approval from their escort, connecting the dots seems to be an issue, and I don’t know how that could be done better. I don’t know if we have to hire a super A-type personality to get in there and put sticky notes and come up with these processes and spreadsheets. I don’t know what the right solution is. The Department of Health is a huge department. I’m sure they can find someone who has great ideas how to link these things, but linking folks through this process has been really a problem.
When you have someone that’s approved for medical travel, how do you link the escort? How do people know what they’re doing, where they’re going and what time to be there? I mean, I’ve heard many horror stories about how people have believed that they were supposed to be on that plane and they get there and there’s no plane ticket sitting there waiting for them. They didn’t get cab fare to that airport so they pay out of their pocket. They get there and then they’re told there’s no plane ticket there. Then they don’t know who to call when they’re panicking. When you’re sick it may, frankly, be an unfortunate experience. If you’re super deathly ill or you’re trying to be the hero through being the escort helping that person who’s going through this terrible experience, people are under a very difficult challenge at that time emotionally, they’re stressed, and all of a sudden now they don’t have plane tickets, they don’t know who to call. It certainly isn’t Ghostbusters.
But the fact is they are stressed. We need, I don’t know if it’s a simple pamphlet that once you’re approved they hand it to you and say, how do you connect these dots? Any problem, you call this phone number and this person has the authority to delegate a solution. I don’t know where it’s going.
But just to continue on, I don’t have a lot of the issues here that I’m going to tie committee time up with here, but there is very little follow-up. For example, if you’re someone from a small community, which happens regularly that English isn’t you’re first language. I mean, this shouldn’t be a shock to our system. It shouldn’t be a shock to anybody in this area of the Assembly. There’s the language problem. Then, of course, there’s just the connection on how you tie everything together, and certainly, there’s not a follow-up process either to make sure that, hey, did it work, how do we make it better.
I mean, sometimes they call those the 360 process where people make phone calls, who are from the system, obviously, find out, hey, did it work, what could we do better, how do we, as Stephen Covey would say, sharpen the sword. You know, you’ve just got to keep working on the system, tirelessly trying to make it better and better.
Again, I recognize and respect that the people there work on this thing every day, and I recognize that it’s complicated each and every day that they’re working on, but these are people working in ideal situations and when you’re on medical travel or trying to get medical travel, you’re not in an ideal situation. If you’re in a place, as I said at the start, you don’t know who to call, where to go, when to be there, and all of a sudden it starts to have a ripple effect. It just makes the whole experience such an incredible burden that it’s great frustration.
I’m happy we have the motion here before us, and I think, really, what it’s saying is we can find ways to do it better, and I certainly look forward to the department finding ways to make this work better. There may never be a perfect solution, but as I said earlier, I’m sure we’ve got someone who could consider things like how do we connect, as I said, people to their processes better, how do we do follow-ups, how do we ensure that the quality assurance programming on the medical travel is there and make sure people understand exactly what they need to do, where to go, and certainly where to go if you have trouble.
That’s all I’m going to say. I think that it’s an important motion. Again, I want to thank Mr. Yakeleya, and the opportunity to second is certainly an important one and a privilege to work with my colleague on this initiative.