Tom Beaulieu

That’s the entire budget, the global budget for the whole system.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the information here that specifically provides the role of the whole medical travel area, the medevac area. What I know about that so far is that the medical travel, essentially, is taking people from the communities into a medical point where they need to go to get a service and that could be done through a medevac or it could be done through regular medical travel. But I don’t have any information indicating that we have to go away from the outside of the range of where there might be some ground ambulance service and how we go and get those people. I...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, we do need an increase in all of the home care. We are hoping to expand the home care services right across as part of the continuum of seniors’ care. We can provide perhaps some of the other financial details. For that I can ask the deputy minister to provide that.

Thank you. We recognize that Stanton was not designed to handle the volume of visits, the volume of patients that they currently face. That is why we’re going through the planning and going through the capital budget to come back to the House to make some renovations, possible additions and reallocations of space in Stanton.

As far as this budget goes and the $84 million, the budget moving from the revised mains to what we have here as the mains, there’s a difference of $3.36 million and I would say that a large portion of that has been allocated to Stanton. Thank you.

Yes, Madam Chair, I would.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are just going to locate that information and then we will have the… Okay. Perhaps I could get the deputy minister to provide some detail on the expenditure.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The breakdown is NWT Midwives Association, $8,000; NWT Seniors’ Society, $188,000; Canadian Institute for the Blind, $100,000; NWT Council for the Disabled, $183,000; Hay River Committee of Persons with Disabilities, $35,000; in-house respite contributions, $225,000.

We are underfunded for the medical travel of about $5 million.

That committee will be looking at bariatric surgery. Why currently the physicians are refusing to assist individuals that have bariatric surgery, I don’t know, but it’s on the agenda for that committee to look at, at specifically the whole area of bariatric surgery, the whole area of obesity and how it impacts and how it has a direct correlation on chronic disease such as diabetes. Thank you.

Yes, that is correct.