I'll wait then. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I just wasn't sure if it was transferred other there or not. Thank you.

Are there any questions under administrative and support services? Seeing -- oh, Member for Frame Lake.

Yeah, thanks, Madam Chair. I've asked for this before. I had understood that there -- you know, with health system transformation from the regional, you know, boards to NTHSSA, that we'd have better data collection, better data capability. Do we have anywhere publicly available wait times for various services, and if so, where would I find that? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of Health and Social Services.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to start by saying that we report a number of indicators, health indicators, health outcomes, spending, wait times to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. And it maintains an excellent website which allows you to go into different levels of detail around the data that is NWT-specific. In terms of global wait times, I'll ask the deputy minister if she has that.

Thank you. Deputy minister Cecchetto.

Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.

Yeah, thanks, Madam Chair. I don't want to dig us into a bunch of different holes here. But is there -- what about a dashboard? We had the COVID dashboard, you know, during the pandemic where people could easily find data on their communities and so on - vaccination levels, incidents, all that kind of stuff. Do we have anything like that for wait times? And if not, is that something we're looking at or going to do? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Member. Minister of Health and Social Services.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There is no dashboard available that is equivalent to the kind that was maintained during COVID. But there is interest in launching one. Thank you.

Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.

Thanks, Madam Chair. And thanks for that. Yeah, I think the public would definitely be interested in that. Is that something that will happen in this upcoming year then, 2023-2024? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of Health and Social Services.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll ask the deputy minister to answer that.

Deputy minister Cecchetto.

Thank you, Member for Frame Lake.

Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, I would really encourage that because I think if there's -- I know that there's reporting that goes off to the Canadian Institute of Health Research and some other places. But if there was a centralized web page on DHSS or Northwest Territories Health and Social Services Authority with wait times then people, when they call for a service, they'd at least kind of have some sense as to how long the wait time might be to actually get called in. So I would really encourage that we report that ourselves somewhere on a user-friendly dashboard.

I want to just go back to the sustainability office that the Minister mentioned earlier. Is it fully staffed and what, if any, sort of main areas for costs savings have they identified? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of Health and Social Services.

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the office, I believe, is fully staffed or almost fully staffed at this point. And they have -- they have been looking, as I think I mentioned earlier, at cost containment. And so one thing that they've looked at as an example of that is reciprocal billing. It turns out that we were not issuing all the invoices that we could to other jurisdictions for caring for their residents and so that's something that we have paid more attention to in order to ensure that we're getting all the revenue that is properly owed to us.

Another example is going into product listing agreements with pharmaceutical companies to take advantage of discounts they provide on bulk orders. And that has saved us quite a good sum of money, in the millions.

We've also introduced a biosimilar initiative where we fund preferentially biosimilar or generic drugs rather than brand name drugs if the formulation is exactly the same.

So those are some of the things that we've tried to do the cost containment piece of this work. But this is long-term work. We won't be on top of all the ways that we can save money even in the next fiscal year. And this is going to blend together with the government renewal initiative which, you know, we've now done an inventory of all of our programs for. And so I can see that in the next year we're going to be paying more attention to that and what value for money we get for our different programs. So there are initiatives underway that acknowledge the situation that we're in and remedies to it. Thank you.

Thank you. Member for Frame Lake.

Yeah. No, thanks, Madam Chair. And thanks for that explanation. Yeah, and I don't doubt that these people are not at -- I think they're very hard at work; that's great. But is there anywhere their work is kind of summarized or reported on, even at a high level, perhaps once a year? Thanks, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of Health and Social Services.