Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Madam Chair. There are some ins and outs in this particular area. The anti-poverty position is one in; the Health Information Act is two in; there are some financial shared services positions being transferred out, three; there’s the full part-time senior policy advisor position in; and there are two Health Information Act positions in. So there are some ins and outs in this particular area. Thank you, Madam Chair.

I believe I mentioned these in my response to opening comments. Every year we come forward with significant supps for adult and children southern placements. In fact, this year again the Minister of Finance just tabled the supps and those supps include significant asks for actual costs related to adult and children placements. So we are asking for, in this budget, $2.8 million to be added to the budget for adult southern placements and $2.4 million for children southern placements. We recognize that the cost of southern placements is incredibly high and the director of social services has...

Thanks, Madam Chair. There are many reasons why a position might be declared inactive. By way of example, there was some structural… I’m talking about the previous page, but just to put some information and context. There were some positions in the directorate, there was a bit of a reorg in the directorate and one of the admin type positions was described, but it was described with slightly different functions but still administrative. It required a new job description and was awarded a new position number as a result. The position number that was there providing similar or like duties was...

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and we will certainly provide that.

The strategy that the Member is talking about is an old strategy, and moving forward we are going to be coming forward with a new strategy. It’s going to be informed by the continuing care report that was released just a couple of days ago to Members. That’s going to help inform the direction we take. We will be coming forward with an Aging in Place Strategy. We’re hoping to have that done by March 31st of this year, so that we can share it with committee. That will help inform how we move forward to deal with the aging population, the...

Currently all of our authorities are running deficits and this is something that’s been ongoing for a couple of years. We believe by sharing and collaborating on things like procurement and physician services, IT/IS/IM, some financial aspects, we’ll be able to coordinate efforts across the territory and have a more responsive, streamlined approach. But at the end of the day, as I said two days ago now, our focus is on the care that the patients receive and we want to make sure that our patients have a seamless flow through the system. We’ve all heard people talking about how frustrated they...

Madam Chair, the chief clinical advisor is going to be working on this over the next year to look at different procedures that haven’t been covered, including things like bariatric surgery. That will be done over the next year and hopefully we’ll be in a position to have some discussions about what may or may not be added or included in the future.

At this point in time, there is no intention to include naturopathic doctors and the services they provide under insured services. I do have a meeting with the naturopathic doctors here in the near future, where we’ll have an opportunity to hear from...

I’ve committed to having the department look at this and we’ll get back to the Members with some additional detail.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Other than those positions we already discussed, I believe it’s the same. We will confirm and get that information for the Member. Thank you.

I just want to add one piece that I forgot to mention, and it’s basically the Hospital Insurance and Health and Social Services Administration Act is going to be coming forward with a legislative proposal. That is being drafted now, so we will be coming to committee to have some discussions around that.

Many of the back office stuff is well underway and we hope to make significant progress in the IT/IS/IM sections with Stanton and a few of the other authorities bringing them into a central back office function this fiscal year. Procurement we intend to make progress on. There are a number of...

This process we go through with all these pages, there is certainly a lot of information but it certainly can’t break down for the specific detail for each condition in the Northwest Territories. We are, as the Member said, doing a significant amount and I’ve committed to doing a bit of a walk-through of this to try to highlight the different areas, so I can provide the Member and committee with a bit of a highlight on some of the things we are doing overall. The Member is right; this is certainly an area that’s affecting us adversely across the territory.