Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as we move forward with the territorial model it will be based out of Yellowknife, located in Yellowknife, and will be able to provide midwifery services to residents of Yellowknife. But as with anything that we do we have to be able to show cost effectiveness. Currently, although it's not midwifery services we have high quality obstetric services available to the residents of Yellowknife. In the meantime, we don't have complete obstetrical services to individuals outside of Yellowknife in some of our regional centres and our communities. As a result, all those people do have to travel into Yellowknife for birthing purposes.
There's been a suggestion that midwifery is going to save us a whole significant amount of money, but for the individuals in Yellowknife they don't have to travel out now; the people from outside from Yellowknife do have to travel in. We aren't going to be able to downgrade or limit the number of physicians we have in the Northwest Territories by bringing in midwifery services so we're not going to save any money on physician costs.
I understand there's a significant amount of challenges around understanding some of the financials and we've got some analysis, but what I'll commit to do is retaining an external health economics expert to do an update on our analysis of whether it would actually be cost neutral to-- or achieve efficiencies to bring midwifery services into Yellowknife. Ultimately, we want to do this but we have to make sure we build a proper business case and that way we can demonstrate value for money in doing so. So I'll commit to retaining an external health economics expert to update our analysis and provide us with some more clarity on cost-saving measures if there are in fact any. Thank you, Mr. Chair.