Julie Green

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am pleased to announce the temporary day shelter will open next week at the site of the former visitors centre in Yellowknife. The day shelter is vital to keeping residents experiencing homelessness safe during the depths of winter.

Madam Speaker, the need for a temporary day shelter arose from the public health order to physically distance indoors during the COVID19 pandemic. This order, while critical to keeping all residents safe, has reduced capacity at the day shelter and sobering centre on 50th Street, meaning that many individuals who need that service are...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I am aware of similar requests for day shelter options in other communities, including in Hay River and in Inuvik and in Fort Simpson, but establishing this type of service in other communities would need to involve conversations with partners at the NWT Housing Corporation who are the lead on homelessness, taking as a startingpoint that most of these services are required by homeless individuals.

Should there be a way forward to establish additional day sheltering programs, there would be an opportunity to use what we've learned running the temporary...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, all the provinces and territories, including the NWT, submit data to the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System, and the latest statistics for diabetes were published in 2020. The information is broken down by demographics such as age, sex, ethnicity, and community type. And "community type" includes Yellowknife regional centres and small communities. And earlier today I provided the Member with the number of diabetics who live in his community.

The data gathered by the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System is further broken down into a...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, as I said, this kind of tracking is important to us so that we have a full understanding of how long it is taking to meet people's needs for services in these areas. There are some limitations, as the Member referenced, to our electronic medical records system at this time. It's going to be retired in the 20232024 period, and it's going to be replaced with something that is going to be superduper, I hope. And it's going to be able to have an online patient portal. It's going to have all kinds of different ways to report things such as those that the...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. The purpose of the Integrated Care Teams is to allow for greater access and continuity of care and delivery to patients. So the model places the patient and the family at the center of care and then it allows primary care teams to bring in other service providers to provide an integrated spectrum of services to the patient and/or their family. So the idea here is to break down these silos of care and to bring them together into one team. So it is important to know, however, at this point, per the Member's statement, that the Integrated Care Teams are separate from...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we're very interested in tracking wait times because it is a tangible measurement of how quickly the system is providing services to those people in need. We, however, do not track every possible program and service for a variety of reasons that aren't very interesting because they mostly have to do with software and data collection.

But having said that, we do track and report on wait times for longterm care placements, home care services, community counselling, rehab services, and colonoscopies. And some individual clinics are also posting wait times...

Yes, thank you. The terms and conditions of the collective agreement set out the compensation and benefits provided to our indeterminate and casual employees, and this includes locum nursing contracts. Physician locum compensation is separate and in its own collective agreement with the NWT Medical Association. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there isn't hiring that's being planned that would support diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. That really requires a level of specialty that it's necessary to use medical travel to obtain. So, you know, the person would need to go to Edmonton or another place where that kind of specialty is available. What we're offering more is how to support the patient who has that diagnosis.

So going back to home and community care, there was a comprehensive review of that program done in September 2019, and it did, indeed, verify what the Member has said...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the NWT Health and Social Services system has always relied on locums, and that is still the case. The positions are located throughout the NWT, and we use them to cover shortterm gaps and ensure that we're providing quality services to our patients. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this information is housed in the same place as I mentioned to the Member from Deh Cho, the Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance Program which, as a reminder, is a collaborative network of provincial and territorial surveillance systems supported by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The information on the website is broken down into geographic region, age, and sex; and the rate of Alzheimer's and other dementias in the NWT for residents aged 65 and older is 5.73 percent which compares to 6.68 percent nationally. The rate of Parkinson's in the NWT for...