Glen Abernethy

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As the Member knows, when it comes to dementia, we have one facility to provide services to our residents who have dementia. Obviously, that facility is full, and we are always looking for ways to support our people the best that we can. The long-term care facility in Norman Wells is certainly going to help us with that.

With respect to dialysis, I think that everybody in this building is aware of the pressures that we have under dialysis and the work that we are doing. Having said that, we are not looking at expanding our chairs right at this point. We are looking at...

Mr. Chair, originally that's how we were hoping to obtain the $2.4 million in savings. We have done some more analysis; we have done some more digging. We wanted to make sure that we didn't adversely affect many of our residents. Most of the co-pay comes from insurance providers and others, so we've done some tweaking around that. I'm in the process of trying to finalize that work now. I met with committee a number of months ago, where we showed some scenarios. We've taken feedback from committee to make some changes to what we were proposing. We're very close to being ready to come back to...

Not at this time, Mr. Chair. We need to get that report in. We need to have that report analyzed. We need to make sure that our design is getting maximum benefit for the dollars that we do have.

If it turns out that the report suggests that we need to make significant new investments in this area, recognizing that this is the Non-Insured Health Benefits and not covered in most jurisdictions, then we are prepared to begin that work to build the business case that it is necessary to approach FMBS and seek additional funds in the future. There is still a lot of work before we will be ready to do...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is to help us all and together to define the types of and scope of services that are provided in the shelters and what we are able to provide some financial support to so that we have some consistency across the territory and we are able to fund based on a consistent application. I think the Member knows, for many years, we have been funding the shelters, but there really hasn't been any sort of set criteria on why one shelter gets X dollars and the other one does not. So that is where we are working on, is finding something that will help us set sort of some...

Yes, please, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the Member for his comments. I didn't hear a question, but I will note for the Member that, on this particular page, you will see an increase of $782,000. That is for the Norman Wells health centre and long-term care to help us continue to roll out the services there.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Those are based on demand. Not an increase in the level of coverage, but in the number of people accessing, or possibly the complexity of some of the cases. Many different clinical things could drive those costs. We know the costs are up, and we want to make sure we have the dollars to cover them, so the increase is for that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If the Member were to go back and review Hansard, she would notice that the first indication was, in the first year we got those dollars, we lapsed over $900,000. That was mostly because of the fact that we had to create positions, get positions evaluated, get positions established, and then go out and recruit and attempt to fill those positions. That work does take a bit of time, and, as a result, we did not fill the positions on day one of the fiscal year, and we ended up lapsing $900,000. By the second fiscal year, we had all of the positions established. We had all of...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We have been working for a while with the shelters and the shelter network to develop a funding formula that makes sense. We are not a hundred percent done that work, but we figured we had made enough progress to build a solid business case that would allow us to start making valuable increases in this area, which is why you see the $500,000 increase, which represents about a 15-percent increase overall to the shelters.

What we do know is that a lot of other jurisdictions are only partially funded in this area and that they raise a lot of money on their own, which is true...

We do have a long way to go, as the Member knows. We have a bit of a backlog that we need to work our way through to the point where we can actually have quicker turnaround times on all of our files, to have a standard or a more reasonable wait time for initial assessments, but we need to get rid of some of the backlog. We need to work through some of the backlog.

It is going to be a lot of work. I can't say that we are going to see immediate improvement and a more reasonable wait time immediately. It is going to take us a bit of time, but we are now in a position to start knocking off some of...