Glen Abernethy

I agree. There are, as I’ve indicated, a number of things that are happening. I talked about the training that’s available for elders across the Northwest Territories with respect to prevention and injury, especially from fall prevention. This year the department is supporting training in 28 communities as part of the Elders in Motion program, so there is education out there to help individuals attempt to avoid experiencing a fall.

I’m going to come back to my other response, Madam Speaker. We need consistent clinical guidelines across the system. We have a chief clinical advisor who is helping...

I certainly can’t talk to any individual case, but I do know we have highly competent professionals throughout the system who are doing great work in all communities, all regions and all facilities within the Northwest Territories. I can’t, obviously, speak to the individual case, but clinical guidelines would certainly be helpful across the Northwest Territories.

With respect to things like medevacs, we are doing things like Med-Response, which we hope to see roll out shortly, which are going to give communities a voice to a professional who is going to be able to streamline, coordinate and...

The ASIST program, we have put dollars in the budget so that every authority can deliver two ASIST programs or two training workshops. To date, in ’12, ’13, ‘14, 144 individuals across the Northwest Territories have taken that training, and we will continue to encourage the authorities to use the dollars they have received to deliver that program in as many communities as they can over time.

There are a number of different things that happen depending on the location you’re at. The NWT Community Counselling Standards Manual has a standard on crisis intervention, which would respond to crisis situations similar to suicide or attempted suicide. The standard identifies suicide protocols and procedures for action to be taken, documentation and screening, such as the mental status examination and suicide risk assessments. So those happen in the community if somebody presents with an attempted suicide. The manual also includes suicide prevention resources that an individual may access.

W...

We can require individuals to put information into a prescription monitoring program, or we can, rather, ask them to do, but we cannot force them to do it at this particular point in time. Once we have the Health Information Act, it will be a requirement and they will need to put it in there. The Member is actually, in fact, wrong.

With respect to what we are doing already, the individual health authorities, as I have already said, have put in place processes to limit access to prescription medications in situations where they have concern about a potential abuser. I will go a little further...

There are things happening with respect to the survey. I’ll certainly get that information back to the Member.

Within individual health and social services authorities, or at the authority level, steps have been taken and put in place to limit access to prescription medications in situations where there is a concern about potential abuse of medications. Also, the federal government is currently working in partnership with all of the territories and provinces across the country and looking at ways to address prescription drug abuse. As a department, we will continue to work with the federal and...

Madam Speaker, having healthy, vibrant and safe communities is a key priority for the Government of the Northwest Territories. This is why, over the past year, we have worked with communities as they developed wellness plans, to set priorities and guide how wellness funding should be directed.

I am pleased to announce that all of our communities are on track to complete their plans by March 31, 2014. These are living documents. They speak of the importance of supporting families and child development, celebrating culture, eating good food, being active, promoting mental wellness, building local...

The individual that’s doing that assessment is one of the quality assurance people making sure that EMR is being utilized appropriately.

With respect to individuals accessing or abusing the information, I’m not actually aware of any situations. I will talk to the department to see if we have any evidence or suggestions that someone has breached files confidentiality.

As I’ve said to the Member before, if the Member is aware of a situation, it sure would be nice if he would be willing to share that information so we can get into the system to make sure no breaches are happening. We take all...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. As I said in the past when asked this question, we do have a number of protocols with respect to who has access to records, but we also do have a quality assurance professional that does review who is accessing files isn’t looking specifically at the files themselves, but is looking at and monitoring access. That person looks to see how many people are accessing, how often an individual might be accessing a particular file, will check to see if somebody has the same surname as the file is accessing it to make sure people are only accessing files they should. If and...

I don’t know if those types of statistics are kept. I will check with the department and get back to the Member. Thank you, Madam Speaker.