Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. One of the challenges we face around midwifery and providing birthing services in communities outside of Fort Smith, Hay River, Yellowknife and Beaufort-Delta, Inuvik in particular, is that we need to make sure the facilities are appropriate, that individuals can receive the proper diagnostic and specialist obstetric or services such as C-section. Most of our communities don’t have the capacity to provide that type of service. So we need to make sure we focus our attention where we can actually provide birthing services.

What we’re talking about now is pushing midwifery...

Just for clarity, the Midwifery Program that was in Yellowknife was never funded. It actually never had core dollars to fund that program. It was funding the authority had taken out of other programs in order to create midwifery services.

I’m still committed to midwifery services, I always have been, which is one of the reasons we are looking at re-envisioning how we roll out midwifery services over the next couple of years.

As I indicated, we had planned to move forward with Beaufort-Delta. Things look like they might be changing. There have been some alternate proposals submitted to us on how...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We don’t actually have any programs at this time dedicated strictly or particularly to post-traumatic stress disorder, but we do have psychiatric assessment and treatment that is available both on an in-patient and outpatient basis. So if an individual is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, they can access outpatient care or treatment through a referral from a nurse or a doctor or other professionals here in the Northwest Territories. So I would strongly encourage individuals who are going through this to get in touch with their medical practitioners. Thank...

Yes, understood.

Mr. Speaker, this is true for all the communities in the Northwest Territories where we don’t have emergency rooms, so many of our small communities are in this particular situation.

When an individual in one of these communities is sick or experiencing an emergency, there are numbers they can call into their health centre, whether it’s a community health nurse or, in the case of Tsiigehtchic, CHR or CHW, or in Tsiigehtchic they may actually choose to call the emergency room. Those professionals will still be able to contact Med-Response to help coordinate medical response in those communities...

Once we have a better idea of what the program is and what it offers, it’s something we may be able to do, but at this time I just don’t know enough about it to say yes or no.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The reviews the Member is talking about are all part of the entire health transformation we’re going through right now where we’re looking at how we’re providing services in all communities throughout the Northwest Territories in order to enhance services. That work is ongoing. The legislation will be coming in front of this House shortly and the planning will continue through to 2016, when we hope to go live.

But at the same time, we’re not just waiting for that to happen. We are implementing Med-Response, which I’ve mentioned several times in the House. We did a soft...

At this point in time there is no intention to build a territorial treatment facility in the Northwest Territories. We will continue to utilize the incredible facilities that we use in the South that are giving a wide range of programs and services to the people of the Northwest Territories; we will continue to deliver on-the-land programming through our Aboriginal partners, which the money has been put in the budget to do so; and we are continuing to pursue the mobile treatment options, which I would be happy to discuss with Members more.

With respect to withdrawal management, that is in the...

The work has begun but it is not concluded.

We have a number of different programs that we are working on. We do have a chronic disease prevention promotion program that is underway and we have programs like BETTER and other tools that are available in individual communities to residents across the Northwest Territories. In every one of those programs we talk about the value of not smoking, eating healthy and getting lots of exercise. Healthy people will be more productive, they will contribute to society more, they will be living better lives and, obviously, that will result in lower overall health care costs in the long term. Thank...