Sandy Lee

No, Mr. Chairman. The Member knows that is not going to be solely my decision. What I meant by that is looking at the demographics territorial-wide and looking at how big our senior populations are, and what ages they are, and knowing all of the other indicators that we, as a government, have to prepare for increasing long-term care beds.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are a couple of issues that the Member raised. The first one about how services were better back in the ‘80s, I do not have information to either accept that or dispute that. I believe, by and large, this government is able to keep records from basically ‘99-2000, because it’s just hard to make comparisons when we’re talking about information prior to division. Anecdotally, I used to work as an executive assistant of the Minister of Health and Social Services for the entire NWT and I think there were as many issues back then as there are now.

On the issue of...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is a lot of work being done on this area and I would like to ask the deputy minister to update the Members. Thank you.

I’m sorry, Mr. Chairman, are we still on 8-17?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On this issue, I, as Minister, committed to the Standing Committee on Social Programs to seek input from the public, obviously. I have just had a substantive update on that. I am going to be seeking to go to Cabinet for Cabinet input. I will also be seeking to go to the Standing Committee on Social Programs as soon as we can organize that. We are ready to do that now and also we need to have consult with the public working group on that. So we are in the process of communicating that to the standing committee, so we can give the committee members an update and seek...

Yes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The fact is, the way our authorities are set up, authorities work as a unit. Authorities hire doctors and nurses, and they have to rotate them and other health care professionals. When a nurse or somebody gets hired by our authority, they’re not necessarily hired into a community but hired as an employee of the authority. Somewhat like a school board; when you get hired in the school board you work in whatever schools they send you to.

As I said already, the Beaufort-Delta Health and Social Services is not alone in not being able to recruit all of the nurses and doctors...

I believe that’s what the agreement is and we will have to continue to look into that to see whether that could be changed or not. I can refer to the deputy minister to see if she wants to add more to that.

Mr. Chairman, I will send him a note. Thank you.

The number of 15 cases, that the Member stated, in a population as small as 583 is huge. So I need to get more information on the names and just get more information on that to start with. The department will work with the Deh Cho Health and Social Services Authority to look into this further and be able to get back to the Member on what our next steps could be on that. Thank you.