Julie Green

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you to the Member for Frame Lake for the question. Once a suicide attempt has taken place, the first step is to assess whether the person requires medical treatment and, as part of the medical treatment, whether the person would benefit from being certified under the Mental Health Act. That would be hospital route. The non-hospital route is to speak with the individual, determine that admission to the hospital is not necessary, and then do a risk assessment with them.

When it is deemed safe for the person to leave the hospital, they take with them a safety plan...

The issues we're talking about here go beyond budgets and money. Aging in place is what most seniors want for themselves. They want to stay in their home. They want to have services that come to them from the community, whether it's a nurse or a personal support worker or a family member, and they want these people to assist them to remain independent for as long as possible. That's really the future for elders in the Northwest Territories and in the country as a whole. Long-term care has turned out to be a disaster in southern Canada. It has turned out to be a place where way too many people...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am happy to repeat these answers for the Member for Great Slave. What I want to say is that I don't expect the kind of information that she is asking for because the situation with COVID-19, with the vaccine rate, with the rate of variants, and so on, it is so quickly changing that it would soon be obsolete to do the flow chart that she is asking for and then to be able to make sure that it was implemented in exactly that way. It is just too fluid a situation. We do, however, appreciate the need for that kind of information. We are more than happy to work with...

According to my information, nine of 23 clients at Woodland Manor have dementia, and I certainly do recognize that residents with dementia need additional care. We don't want them to roam or leave or hurt themselves or be lost. It's my understanding that all of the new builds for long-term care centres take into account dementia as a diagnosis and they are constructed to keep dementia patients safe, so that is a consideration in all of the long-term care builds. As things stand now, we only have a long-term care facility here in Yellowknife. We recognize that, going forward, people want their...

Let me state, first of all, that my hope is for a very high vaccine uptake so that the whole territory is able to come out of restrictions and resume life as we knew it a year ago. We do not want to pit communities against one another. That is definitely one of the risks that the CPHO will be assessing in deciding what detail to release to the public in terms of vaccination levels, whether it is feasible to release by community or by region.

Some of the variables that the Office of the Chief Public Health Officer will be looking at, as I mentioned before, is whether the vaccine will prevent the...

My vision is that more people will live in their own homes with homecare support than live in long-term care, and in order to achieve that, we need to invest in nurses, personal support workers. We have to evaluate the outcome of the paid community caregiver program and see which resources best fit the needs for people who are trying to age in place. The home and community care study that was tabled about 18 months ago has specific numbers of nurses and personal support workers required to make aging in place work, and there is no budget item for them at this point. It certainly is my...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don't have the full detail that the Member is looking for because the Chief Public Health Officer is still refining the numbers. What I can say is that we've achieved approximately 58 percent uptake on vaccine dose 1, and 36 percent uptake on dose 2. The range of community level uptake is between 40 percent and the high 70s depending on the particular community. We know from trending information that the highest step taken is in the oldest population, and the lowest is in the youngest population. The residents of the NWT who are between 18 and 34 are well below the 50...

Of those people who currently live at Woodland Manor, none are from Fort Resolution and none are from Kakisa, but four are from Fort Providence. It turns out that you can be in long-term care in the NWT wherever you want to be in long-term care, so while there are people in Woodland Manor who are not from Hay River, such as the person from Inuvik, and from Fort Smith and from Fort Simpson, likewise, there are people from Hay River who are in long-term care facilities in other parts of the NWT. This is a personal choice that they can make based on where their supports and their families are...

It is my understanding that the consultation on the new bed projections is about to begin next month with, in fact, a trip to Hay River to talk to people there about the findings and to verify those numbers on the ground. We have not done that in advance. The study that was done was done by the Bureau of Statistics. They are not using qualitative information; they are using quantitative information about the size of the population, the health of the population, where they live, and so on and so forth. That is not the kind of document that we would normally expect them to consult on. We just...

Just to provide some numbers for turnover, this is for March 31, 2020, the turnover rate at the NWT Health and Social Services Authority was 15 percent. For the GNWT as a whole it was 13.2 percent. Our turnover rate at the health authority is on par with the government as a whole. The NTHSSA does not offer retention bonuses at this point. All the compensation and benefits that nurses and health professionals earn are part of the current collective agreement with the UNW. Thank you.