Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d also like to recognize a few Great Slave constituents who are here, who are either participating or involved in organizing the NWT Campaign School. They are Karen Willy, Kathy Paul-Drover as well as Samantha Thomas. Thank you all for coming today.

It’s not a matter of dragging our heels; we are in fact working on this particular issue. However, lack of in-house pharmaceutical expertise does make the project of this nature quite challenging.

The department has actually hired an expert consultant on pharmaceuticals to assist in the guiding of the understanding of this complex issue. As a pharmacist, I know the Member does understand how complex this can be. We have made recent amendments to the Pharmacy Act to enable a prescription drug monitoring program to be implemented here in the Northwest Territories. The Program Review Office is...

Mr. Speaker, the management of the airports is actually done by the Department of Transportation, and we will continue to work with Transportation to ensure that those requirements are met.

But I would like to say that as a result of these incidents, we have made other changes in our system outside of the contract that we’ve currently negotiated. We have developed what is called a Med-Response unit within the department. It’s a territorial program. One of the key functions of this Med-Response unit is to provide air ambulance triage and make sure that the right people are on the phone at the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In negotiating the final contract, the communities of Jean Marie River, Nahanni Butte and Trout Lake runways currently require aircraft with a short take-off distance. As a result of this contract, we’ve set it up so that the turnaround time on these particular airports, the shorter runways, is two hours, compared to four hours like it used to be. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, the triage service is actually something that’s provided by the Government of the Northwest Territories, and we will be working incredibly closely with the airline and the med responders as well as our health providers in the individual communities, whether it’s a CHR or community health nurse. They’ll be able to call into a central line where they’ll have medical staff as well as someone to dispatch the airplane to make sure that all the people that need to make decisions with respect to getting an airplane into a community are on the line at the same time in order to get maximum...

Mr. Speaker, in the contract there has been identification that the providers have to have planes that can get into the shorter runways within the time specified. For those shorter runways, the time specified has been two hours, and that determines the conditions that have been met.

This contract goes live on April 1st, so effective April 1st it will be a two-hour turnaround time, barring, of course, weather conditions that may limit us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

When I was in Hay River, the concerns I heard were: is this centralization, what about bringing our people in from Hay River into the public service, and the other one was the board and how would we get back to a board or council for Hay River representation. Absolutely, this is not centralization. Even if we work together and partnership purchase to get economies of scale, we are still going to need the individual in the Hay River for Health and Social Services Authority or the regional hospital to coordinate the purchase of the supplies they need. We will still need those individuals at the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When I was in Hay River earlier this summer, talking about board reform and the governance changes that we are proposing, I did meet with the public and one of the things that came up on regular basis is recognizing that Hay River is outside the public service and how do we bring them in. We are working on that right now. We are quantifying what the cost might be to bring them over into the public service and what other actions may be necessary. Once we have that information, we will be in a better position to figure out what our next steps will be and how and if we can...

I’ve been very careful not to say that this will save us a significant amount of money. This is about improving the services and the results for the people of the Northwest Territories and removing the barriers to care that exist, which are obviously bad for the patients. We anticipate an opportunity to control future spending through shared services like working together on things like purchasing and other functions, but it’s difficult to quantify what those savings will be. We are putting together a project team now to start working through some of these details, and as I’ve indicated, as...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. One of the key differences to what we’re doing in the Northwest Territories is coming to one authority. It’s actually the creation of these regional wellness councils which are going to be advisory bodies made up of individuals from the community and the region in which they serve. So for example, in the Beaufort-Delta we have a board, it is being run by a public administrator now, but that board will cease to exist. We’ll put in place a wellness council that will be made up of individuals from the regions, hopefully from every community, and they will have the ability to...