Julie Green

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, a limiting factor, until yesterday, was that there was no nonessential travel in and out of Yellowknife. And communities made it very clear to us that they did not want to see people from Yellowknife in their communities. That, fortunately, is now over. So we are in a position where we can go back to Tuktoyaktuk and the smaller communities.

One of the reasons that the department wanted to acquire the Pfizer vaccine is because there are six doses in a vial rather than ten. So that means there needs to be fewer people on the waiting list in order to make...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, given the number of times the authority and the department have been up and down the highway to speak with the leadership in Fort Providence about the issues in their health centre, I don't think it's at all fair to characterize us as ignoring the situation. We are fully engaged. I am really pleased to hear now the community is ready to meet with the COO of the Deh Cho Region and start working on the specific issues that the Member has raised and I encourage them to go forward with the meeting that is planned this month. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the Member has been consistently critical of the services in his community, and we have paid attention to that. There is staff turnover in his community at this time. There are two nurse vacancies that will probably not be filled right away because nurses are in very short supply. Complaints about staff conduct have been relayed to the Nurses Association and to the GNWT. The Health Authority Management went to meet with staff in the community in April to understand their concerns. There was an audit conducted of programing within the health centre on...

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, to take a step back from that question, the department first needs to learn what services are going to be provided. So in the last fiscal year, the department funded the Northern Birth Work Collective to create an Indigenous doula and birth work training program. And we see a lot of potential in this, and we're looking forward to the results of this training and development. And once that's in place, then the department will be in a better situation to learn what the service model is, how communities are going to access the services, and then make an...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for the question. In February 2019, the Department funded an Indigenous doula maternal support training session that had a number of Indigenous governments as well as the Health and Social Services Authority involved, with a total of 16 participants. The key findings from the participants from this pilot were, first, participants want to support Indigenous women and their families to reclaim their identity, their health, and exercise greater control over their own childbirth and parenting experiences.

Second, doulas and birth work can contribute to the healing...

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the Member's frustration but what we learned in Yellowknife in the month of May is that everything can change overnight, where one case at a school ultimately became 71 cases with a thousand contacts and 43 households in isolation. The key thing there was we had a large unvaccinated group who are not eligible for vaccines because of their age, and we had 40 percent of the people there, the youth, were asymptomatic. So they didn't know they had COVID. They had no symptoms of it. And another  something like 20 percent had only one symptom...

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there's a process laid out in the Public Health Act. The CPHO is an independent health official, a medical doctor. That person evaluates the situation and determines the risk of the disease to the public. That person then creates public health orders that would mitigate that risk. And that advice comes to me, and I declare a state of emergency to give force to the orders that the Chief Public Health Officer has made. So I am taking advice from the Chief Public Health Officer who is looking at the technical risk assessments, which I do not have a level...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'm not aware of the same kind of adverse effects with the Pfizer vaccine as there have been with the AstraZeneca vaccine. They are different kinds of vaccines. And I don't know a lot about how they're different. I just can tell you that they are apples and oranges in terms of vaccines.

But what I can say is that we are very interested in going back to communities and providing more vaccinations. Just as the Member said, this is what we hoped, that people would see that those who got vaccinated did great, they have a lot more freedom, they can isolate for...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we've been vaccinating teachers along with the rest of the population, 18 plus, since March. There have been three trips in to Tuktoyaktuk to provide vaccinations. If there are people who still require vaccinations, they should call the health centre and make that need known so that another trip into Tuk can be planned. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I just want to make the distinction between the Department of Health and Social Services and the Health and Social Services Authorities. The Department of Health and Social Services is the policy arm of the operation. The implementation on the ground in the health centres is the Health and Social Services Authority. I haven't received a request from another health centre for a program audit. But one was done at the health at the Fort Providence health centre on March the 19th. Thank you.