Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is actually very familiar with the screening brief intervention and referral process. They are familiar with both the practice, and they have done some research. In fact, they did utilize that tool here in the Northwest Territories dating back to 2014. It was actually used as part of an approach to work with youth, and it was done in conjunction with some screening tools, including motivational interviewing. Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, I have confirmed with the department that there was not a lot of uptake by practitioners. Practitioners like physicians...

Off the top of my head, I can't tell you what the vacancy rate is across the entire system, but with respect to community health nurses in the 65 positions that we have established, we are running at about an 18.5-percent vacancy. Many of those are filled by short-term locums to ensure that we have full coverage in communities while we continue to try and recruit on an indeterminate basis. We have fantastic health professionals out there. Some of them do choose, for any number of reasons, to move on to different opportunities, so we have a constant turnover. We do, and we will continue to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe that there are about 65 funded community health nurse positions across the Northwest Territories, and we run about an 18.5-percent vacancy on those. We are constantly out recruiting and trying to find nurses to come into our community health centres on a permanent basis.

Given that many of our nursing stations are small, with three or four nurses, when one of those individuals is either sick or has to leave on short notice, there are definitely some service impacts on that. When we know that individuals are leaving or coming to an end of a term, we have an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The process has actually gone through an RFP in the past. I can't tell you exactly how the last one was, whether it was an extension to a contract or whether it was an RFP. I would have to check and get that information, but it does go through an RFP. The current contract that is in place now actually expires on December 31, 2019, and within the contract that we have with them, we do have the ability to extend until December 31, 2024. The contract is not renewed. The authority would follow up through the normal RFP process. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The menus are reviewed by a dietician, and the contract that we do have with the boarding home has provisions requiring the contractor to be compliant with the Canada's Food Guide, so dietician and contract. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I will get that information from the department so we can actually be explicit with the actual numbers. I do want to point out that there are over 80 action items in the quality improvement plan. Those build on the recommendations of the Auditor General, internal findings, and committee recommendations. A number of those actions have been completed. Nine of them are already completed out of 80 action items. Nineteen of them are ongoing, which means we have already made the improvements and now it is a matter of implementing them on an ongoing basis. Thirty-two of them have been initiated. We...

As much as possible, the answer is yes. They do attempt to triage patients as best they can; however, they're not always aware of all the information, or all the preferences, or all the needs of our clients and/or our patients. We strongly encourage our residents to let the boarding home what some of their limitations are as much in advance as possible, so that they can be properly triaged and properly placed.

Just as a note, there are some public washrooms available in the facility if one of the ones that are in the area they're staying in is occupied. So there are options, but they do try to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Throughout the entire process, the department has been reaching out to staff in the Indigenous governments to make sure we are getting feedback and ideas from them. At the same time, I have also had some correspondence back and forth with a number of the Indigenous governments, and my deputy had an opportunity to meet with the Tlicho Government to provide some presentation on what we have heard, what we have seen, in order to get some feedback from them. We have put together a draft quality improvement plan that has been presented to committee. We have taken committee's...

I would like to table this document as soon as I can, but I have made a commitment to work with the Indigenous governments. The Member's first line of questioning actually asked those specific questions. We will meet with our Indigenous partners. We will get their feedback and their input. If it results in changes to the Quality Improvement Plan, we will make those changes, and then we will release the document and make it public. Hopefully we will do that before next session, at which point I would be willing to table it next session. If the work that we need to do with the Indigenous...

One of the items that has been completed is we provided refresher training on SDM to 25 staff. This training is part of the training-the-trainer model, which will be implemented across the Child and Family Services system. We have also completed a written protocol for quality assurance checks of the SDM tools.