Glen Abernethy

The activities within the Continuing Care Services Action Plan are focused on ensuring culturally safe palliative care for clients and their families throughout the Northwest Territories, and staff are being supported to have cultural safety awareness training. This includes, obviously, updating and adapting practises and resources and tools to ensure that they are contextually as well as culturally appropriate. I know the Member knows, we recently released a Cultural Safety Action Plan which would also be applied in all the work that we do in this area. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The department has reviewed the recommendation, and we accept it. Just as a note before I go into comments specifically about the recommendation, the GNWT does have a safe disclosure policy. I understand the Member's suggestion that there needs to be something other than that, but I do strongly encourage staff, if they feel that there is something going wrong or something not working the way that it should, they always have the opportunity to use the safe disclosure policy.

With respect to this recommendation, the department does agree with the recommendation and has...

The Continuing Care Services Action Plan has already been released. It's a public document, and objective number 4 is the area where we're focusing on some work in the palliative care. We're doing the homecare review, those types of things that are going to help inform how we move forward in this area. Also, Charting Our Course: Northwest Territories Cancer Strategy 2015-2025 has also already been released, and we've already hired a territorial palliative care specialist who is doing a significant amount of work to help streamline palliative services here throughout the Northwest Territories.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The department has actually already committed to this action in the Quality Improvement Plan. Please take a look at action item 4.6. The Foster Family Coalition of the Northwest Territories is currently engaging us in this action item. I do take the Member from Yellowknife Centre's point, and I will certainly raise those issues with the deputy and the team working on this to see what additional steps may be necessary to make the training mandatory. If we can do that, we will certainly look at that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to provide Members with an update on the draft Child and Family Services Quality Improvement Plan. The quality improvement plan sets out actions that we are taking right now to address issues identified as part of internal reviews, the 2018 Auditor General's Report, and from staff feedback.

The quality improvement plan extends the work that was started under Building Stronger Families, and refocuses our efforts in those areas where it is needed the most. It reinforces what has already been achieved, ensures outstanding items are completed, and addresses...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We accept this recommendation. The department has committed to this action in the Quality Improvement Plan. It is specifically in action item 3.5. Increased communication and engagement of staff has been, obviously, an important focus for improving change management in all CFS strategic initiatives. The aim, obviously, is to bring decision-making closer to the front line and ensure that any quality improvement initiatives make sense in the context of front-line approach in the communities across the territories at the front line, in the communities where the children live...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. For the remainder of this term, we will certainly provide reports twice yearly, as the report says. Given the desire of multiple committees to be involved, I am prepared to send a letter with joint receivers, so I will send it to both the chair of government office and the chair of the Standing Committee on Social Development, and together we can work to figure out how to present, given that both parties are clearly interested, so we can work out those details going forward.

I will certainly recommend by way of a transition document that that same commitment remain in...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We accept that recommendation. As a note, this Legislative Assembly has already agreed to develop some process conventions around this area. My one comment on it is I'd hate to presuppose the outcomes of that process convention. It seems like the Member has already determined what that process convention is going to look like. I would say that we need some caution around that.

I've been around for a number of years, and I've seen a number of Auditor General's reports come in, and not all of them asked for an action plan. So if we're developing process conventions that say...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To the recommendation, we have read through the recommendations in this report and, with respect to recommendation one, we agree. The department values the work that has been done by the Standing Committee on Government Operations and will certainly incorporate the recommendations that are not already covered in the quality improvement plan that are being made by the committee.

A couple of them, we have some questions about content and specificity, but in general, we agree with incorporating their changes into our report. As we are going through each motion, I will talk...

As the Member so accurately described in his Member's statement, there has been a lot of work done on this, a lot of years on this, and certainly been a lot of advocacy in this particular area. Public feedback received through the 2017 midwifery stakeholder engagement process has informed the work of the advisory committee on midwifery to help it develop the process and the approach to midwifery expansion. The advocates and consumers were specifically targeted in this engagement. The advisory committee, which included representation from the authorities and the Midwifery Association, are going...