Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I guess aside from having some contact with the MLAs from the Beaufort-Delta, we have not discussed reappointment of a health board with the Aboriginal governments or the other municipal governments in the Beaufort-Delta. We have continued to work with the public administrator in the Beaufort-Delta.

Yes, I think there is a way that we can improve the communication and I will have that discussion with the executive, and they will, in turn, have a discussion with the people that are responsible for making sure that the lines are open when people want to get a hold of information.

The reason that the applications are often returned is an issue of ensuring that people are eligible for health care cards when they apply for it. There is information that is needed on the health care card that guarantees that those individuals are eligible, and we are trying to comply to previous issues where...

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. There are 11,600 until birthdates, until the 16th of May of this month, and at that point we had processed approximately 86 percent of those. But right up until the end of 2013 we will have about 38,000 people right from January too. So another 26,000 and some-odd cards, people whose cards will expire from May until December. Then the rest of the people, the 3,000 or so residents of the NWT, their cards will be expiring in 2014.

The anticipation is that things would go smooth and that an individual that gets a postcard 45 days before their birthday will then have, essentially, some time – I believe it’s four months even after their birthday – to apply. But their coverage is intended to continue as long as they have actually applied, whether they have the card or not.

That is just something that we’re doing now, because, of course, ideally, people would apply for their cards, go through the regular system, the card would come on time and they would be covered. That was the planning that took place. That was the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is working with all of the health authorities and also the health centres right across the territory to try to make this renewal of health cards as smooth as possible.

As of the middle of this month, we were to process 11,600 health care cards starting in January 2013. We have about an 86 percent compliance. We have about 86 percent of those processed, so there are a lot of health cards being done. Overall, we need to process about 38,000 health care cards in 2013.

For the most part we think it’s going fairly smoothly. We do have some glitches in the...

I will assume that the Territorial Electronic Medical Record Project Team will be looking at best practices across the Territories and then put the information together for the act, and also that they had also reviewed all of the Privacy Commissioner’s recommendations, and through the review they have addressed the concerns of the Privacy Commissioner pertaining to this area.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Health Information Act is top priority for the Department of Health and Social Services, and we would be hoping that the bill will be ready for introduction in the 2013 fall session.

If we thought there were shortfalls, we wouldn’t be putting in such a system. We feel that this is an improvement. We’re handing a patient over the same way that all of Alberta that medevac people into Edmonton hand their patients over. We think we’re handing them over to the Alberta Health Services at that point and we think that the patient is getting good care, excellent care from the time that they arrive. They’re able to go into the terminal, they’re able to turn the plane around quicker, the medevac plane can have a patient waiting there, delivered there by Alberta Health Services and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The fact that the Edmonton Centre Airport closed down was not a decision that laid with this government. The fact that there is more time to fly to the International Airport is because it happens to be further away than the Municipal Airport. However, what I was referring to was the care once the person arrived. We are able to move the person that is being medevaced to Edmonton into an ambulance service that would take them through the city and we are able to hand them over at the airport instead of outside, or having a contractor that we were contracting from here pick...

All of the standards for the medevacs are laid out in the contracts between Stanton and the people that provide medevac services. Again, it would be difficult to put an actual time period in any specific community because it would depend largely on what type of craft would be needed.

In this specific case, the plane that would be ready under normal circumstances to pick up a medevac was not suitable to go into Trout Lake. They had to reconfigure a different plane. That took some time.

I agree with the Member that there was too much time at the outset contacting the medical people, and we are...