Julie Green

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we do have a highlevel service dashboard that is available online, but it doesn't drill into the level that the Member is asking for. And so I will follow up with her to give her specific times for Inuvik, Stanton, and Fort Smith. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we're not looking at making that change.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority is now actively recruiting two medical social workers who will support community outreach efforts and coordinate clinical care. So I don't know where that process is at, but the money has been identified; the ad has been posted, and we it usually takes somewhere up to 12 weeks to fill a position. So I hope that before we leave here at the end of March, you will I will be able to announce to you that the medical social workers are in place. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to thank the MLA for the engagement he has with this issue in his community. I'm very pleased that he gets calls directly and can provide the information that he has and I'm providing. So there are all frontline registered nurses are qualified to administer and support medical detox under the direction of a physician, and that applies to opioids and alcohol. So the starting point is to go to the health centre and to be assessed for the substance that the person wants to detox from, and the process then rolls from there. There are always registered...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have a Return to Oral Question asked by the Member for Kam Lake on October 27, 2022, regarding Infertility Treatment.

To answer the Member’s question as to who decides what conditions are covered as a medically necessary insured health service, it is not unfortunately a simple answer.

There are multiple factors that come together to determine what is deemed a medically necessary insured service. While the Canada Health Act sets out the principles of its Medicare system, specifically the principles of universality, portability and accessibility, it is the...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, I wish to table the following document: Followup Letter for Oral Questions 1210, 1232, and 125519(2): Addictions Treatment. Thank you.

Having a little private laugh about a meeting this morning. Yes, what we need is we need to do several things. One is that we need an increase to the Canada health transfer, and that's something that the Premier is working on at the Council of the Federation table. And you may have seen the ads reinforcing those messages that have appeared recently.

We are also negotiating with the federal government to continue to fund and, in fact, augment the Territorial Health Innovation Fund which is it's a fund that acknowledges that costs in the NWT, and this fund is available in Nunavut and Yukon too...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, it's easy to secondguess spending by a big department by Health and Social Services. And if the Member has ideas, then certainly we're open to hearing from them.

NTHSSA is now one entity. So it's a whole system approach to understanding what the cost drivers are and what to do about them. So examples of initiatives underway now are

Improvements to inventory controls and purchasing;

Process improvements to improve billing and collection of accounts receivable for chargeable services;

Improvements to processes used for managing facilities and fleet;

Processes...

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Madam Speaker, the six facilities, now five, that we contracted was the result of an RFP process. What we were looking for was variety in the possibilities that we could offer. And I believe those contracts were for three years, so they have about a year and a half to go. So this is a process that is renewed from time to time. And we can certainly test any options that the Member might want to bring to our attention at that time. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. We did a comprehensive addictions survey about a year and a half ago, and that collected a lot of valuable feedback about what people experienced in treatment and what they wanted for aftercare. One of the requests there was to have treatment closer to home, and that's something that we are having conversations with the Indigenous governments about. I want to note that when it was time to set the priorities for this Legislative Assembly, nobody asked for a treatment centre. Thank you.