Julie Green

Just first to the Member's other question. Of course, we do have family violence shelters, five of them in the NWT, and a 24/7 crisis line for people experiencing family violence. As you heard when the Minister of housing talked to the Member from Nunakput, freestanding extra places to go and take calls are in vanishingly short supply in small communities. If people are wanting to send documentation to counsellors or other entities, they can go to the government services offices that exist in most communities and they can send faxes or have scans made there in order to provide the necessary...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are vaccinating NWT residents as a priority group. We are not vaccinating non-residents because of the limited supply of vaccine available to us at this point. What we've had in place all along through the pandemic is that people who are going to work in isolated communities, really regardless of what job they are going to do, have to isolate for 14 days in one of the regional hubs and then move on, if they are welcome, in the small community, and there take the precautions that we all do, wash their hands, wear their mask, and so on and so forth.

I feel that the...

I want to emphasize again how seriously the department takes the need to provide a variety of mental health supports to all residents of the NWT. It's my understanding that, in the Member's riding, they don't have resident counsellors in Lutselk'e and Fort Resolution, but they do fly in on a schedule and provide in-person services. Between appointments, they can provide phone and virtual services. In cases where people don't have phones to do follow-up appointments, the department will also look at providing a cell phone for that purpose. Thank you.

We have instituted, as of a year ago, a new way of offering community counselling, which involves no wait time. Instead of scheduling series of appointments for individuals, there are blocks of time that are unscheduled where people can make a same-day appointment or they can make a drop-in appointment. The waiting time for the Community Counselling Program is zero, but for specialized services, such as needing to see a psychiatrist, there may, in fact, be a wait time for that. I can certainly find out what it is and let the Member know.

The Department of Health and Social Services takes mental health issues extremely seriously. We spend $17.5 million a year on mental health supports. We are looking at a range of offerings, which should not be readily dismissed. They are tailored to different kinds of issues and different kinds of communication styles. We have very dedicated counsellors working in 19 communities. We have barrier-free access. You can go in on a drop-in basis. You can go the same day for counselling. We are pretty confident that people are not falling through the cracks because Health Canada is not on the scene...

I'm just going to go over some of the things that we have available to people in the communities. We now have child and youth care counsellors in all schools north of Yellowknife, so that includes many of the most isolated places in the NWT. We have the NWT Helpline, which I mentioned. We have land-based healing, which has had good uptake from Indigenous governments. We have counsellors in 19 communities who are resident, and in the other communities, they are flown in or driven in to provide care on a schedule of so many days per so many weeks. We also have the Strongest Families Institute...

We are giving the vaccine on a priority group basis. Everybody who lives in a small community without a resident nurse and who is over 18 has had the opportunity to receive the first dose. We have also, of course, prioritized people who live and work in long-term care and other congregate settings like jails and shelters. We have also prioritized frontline staff because of their connection to healthcare, and we have prioritized people who have chronic or multiple medical conditions. We have not broken it out by demographic. It is broken out by need, as determined by the Chief Public Health...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am happy to say that there are a number of services in place for seniors. Because homecare is in place in most communities, they have been providing some additional supports, such as phone calls and visits, that are above and beyond what they would have provided before COVID. In communities where there are usually day programs, there have been staff who have been reassigned to provide support one-on-one with people because people are not gathering for the day program at this point, given the COVID-19 pandemic.

Within long-term care, there have been extra efforts to...

I understand what the Member is getting to there, that medical travel to a larger facility like the Inuvik Regional Hospital or Stanton Territorial Hospital can be quite a daunting prospect, and people may not feel comfortable asking the questions that they need to in order to have the answers that they need to navigate the system. I am not aware that there is a particular navigator who is on call in Stanton Territorial Hospital or in the Inuvik Regional Hospital, but that is certainly something that I can inquire about.

I think the longer-term solution is to continue to train people in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the question. My suggestion would be that the person and/or the people who are with that person speak to the nurse in charge or the patient care coordinator. If they continue to be unsatisfied with the answers, they should call their MLA, who will be able to direct them to quality assurance and other resources that will help them to be heard. Thank you.