Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I and the Department of Health and Social Services are clearly supporters of the concept of a wellness court and Health and Social Services has been an active supporter of the concept of a wellness court and it remains a priority as we move forward, and it’s also important to helping address things like the addictions and mental health in the Northwest Territories. The role of the health and social services system is to ensure that mental health services are available. With respect to the wellness court, which will give confidence to the judiciary in the effectiveness of...

The professionals we have in our system who are working with our residents are aware, for the most part, of the types of services and programming that are offered in each of the different facilities in the South. They do share that information with the residents before they go off for treatment.

On a few other points, we do work with our residents before they go down to make sure they have follow-up appointments back in the North, so when they do come back we can work with them to customize after-care. So we do have discussions with them before they go down and we do help them understand the...

With changes there are often glitches, if you will, and we are aware of the concerns the Member is bringing up. We remain committed to our original commitment, which is no loss of the number of jobs in the regions and communities. There would obviously be some changes in reporting relationships and maybe some functions within individual jobs. Recognizing this, the CEOs are meeting next week to talk about their change management process on this to bring back some clarity to something that should have been fairly simple.

The Member is correct. We need to make sure we have a plan that includes an exit strategy and that we use these dollars to help improve the system and put structures in place that will control things that the federal government will require. As I said, in the budget address by the federal government, they identified the $7 million over three years for new targeted and time-limited fund to increase health services in the three territories in priority health areas and to reduce reliance on outside health care systems and medical travel. These are the parameters. We will get more detail and as we...

I’m agreeing.

Clearly, we had some growing pains as we rolled out this new approach on renewing health care cards. We do provide notification to people. We are limited in providing it to known addresses and if people move or they change their post office boxes, we may occasionally miss an individual. I don’t know the situation you’re describing and if you want to share the details with me, please, so that we can insert it into our quality assurance process to make sure that we learn from it and make sure that that type of thing doesn’t happen again. I would say that we have experienced improvement since our...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Long-term care would be under territorial services as opposed to community services, but I understand the Member’s point. Obviously, with an aging population, this is something that we all need to be conscious and aware of, especially how that’s going to roll out and affect communities in the long-term.

We have the continuing care report that was distributed to Members early this week highlighting where we are now and where we need to go. That’s going to help us inform our Aging in Place Strategy. So, as we move forward with this Aging in Place Strategy we’ll start to...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The deputy did describe some of the growth, and some of those areas that are growing in the directorate are in direct response to committee and government priorities such as the anti-poverty. A number of positions, as the deputy indicated, are to address moving forward with the Health Information Act and making sure that people understand and that we have the people in positions. It’s about six positions in the directorate. On average, positions are about $100,000-plus, though $600,000 is pretty much the exact growth in this particular area so I think it correlates...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. A number of these items were covered in the THSSI funding that I described yesterday. We’ve put it in 2014-15 and the Department of Finance has agreed to cover these on a one-time basis. The original plan with the THSSI funding, we were always supposed to have an exit strategy. That exit strategy was never fully developed and/or implemented. If we had cut many of these programs that are in place now without having some sort of transition plan, we would have adversely affected these services going to all NWT residents. So we were able to put money in for this year and we...

I do know that Norman Wells was providing some back fill to the community of Tulita with respect to the social workers, but I don’t actually know the current status of the social worker position in Tulita.

We’re constantly working with the authorities, trying to find solutions to their communities’ challenges. We do have positions established for particular purposes, but if the community needs are such, we are always open to have some discussions as long as it’s within the same area of mandate.