Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, to start off, I just want to be very, very clear. Not all residents of the Northwest Territories who require chemo have received care or chemo in the Northwest Territories. Many of our residents have always gone south for chemo, depending on the nature of the cancer, the type of treatment they receive. We did provide chemo services in the Northwest Territories, in Stanton in particular, for certain types of cancer and certain types of treatment.

Since we have come to a single authority, we have been reviewing operations and delivery of services in different areas. We did have a review done of our chemo services here in the Northwest Territories. When that review was done, there were a number of recommendations on how to make improvements to Stanton; better training, some other operational things, some current modern standards. This field is changing all the time. We need to be able to keep on top of it.

As a result of the recommendations, there was a decision made that the best way, the quickest way to get this work done would be to actually temporarily shut down the chemo unit. That would allow us to do the training. The other day, in oral questions, I went through some of the detail on the types of training that are happening. There is some onsite training, book-learning-type stuff, and then there is some clinical practice in Alberta that our staff are going down to participate in and then some practice so that they can consolidate learning.

There are a number of things that are happening. We decided it was best to shut down; send our staff to where they are going to get the best training possible; work on our guideline; make sure that our guidelines are remaining current, remaining fresh; have the mechanism to update appropriately. In that time, we also recognize this is actually an opportunity for us to refresh some of our equipment that we are using in the chemo unit.

As a result of the time it has taken to train our staff and get these regulations done, we felt we didn't want to rush back before we are ready. We are taking a couple of extra weeks over what we initially planned of four to eight weeks, and we are looking into April before we go live. When our patients who can receive chemo in the Northwest Territories come back, we want them to be getting the same high-quality professional services that they are receiving at the Cross in Edmonton today. We have received a lot of feedback from our residents who are going down there about the quality of the service they are receiving. We want to make sure that we can provide the same thing to those residents who will receive chemo in the North.