Tom Beaulieu

Madam Chair, like I said, we will work on it. We have something that the Member has brought up, the non-insured services that we work with the federal government in providing non-insured health benefits. Like dental, those will be something that, again, would be another area that we have to work on with BC Health in order to get the patients for their various medical dental services through Fort Nelson. We fully intend to start the process of working on that.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’re looking for the infrastructure plan here. We have a little bit of detail on the capital plan with us. We are at the planning stages of the Stanton Territorial Hospital. We do have the dates on when we’re going to be rolling out the plan and when we’re going to start spending money, of course, in the actual renovation of the hospital, but that largely depends on the approval of the Legislative Assembly. I’m just going to… Bear with me, Madam Chair. The plan now is that prior to March 31, 2013, we’ll have spent $3 million on planning and in this fiscal year we will...

On this new system where we moved to birthdates, we have about 2,000 per month. The majority of them are processed, yes. A lot of the mailings went out after people’s birthdays, on the 21st of January actually, so we do have a bit of a glitch in the system. But, in reality, we didn’t see it as a huge issue, that most people will have their cards renewed. But if they don’t have their cards renewed then, yes, they will not get the service provided at that time. They can get a service and they can pay for it or else they can quickly get the card renewed.

Madam Chair, that would be one of the huge issues in dealing with BC Health in Fort Nelson. At this point, the electronic medical records are for the NWT, and then we have a long history dealing with Health in Alberta, in Edmonton. We have some compatibilities there, but none in British Columbia. So that would be an issue that would be a barrier that we would have to deal with.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The plan is to have three of the positions – the project manager, the policy officer, and the system navigator – in Yellowknife. Just a little explanation. The one project manager is the review of medical travel. The policy officer is a review of the health benefits and will also be located here. The system navigator, located in Yellowknife, is the person in charge of handling all of the issues that are brought forward to the system. The chief physician advisor, although we indicate Yellowknife, could actually be located anywhere in the Northwest Territories.

Madam Chair, this response needs to have a lot of detail in it because of things that we’re doing. So I’m going to ask the deputy minister to provide a detailed response on this whole question, and perhaps the director of finance may also add to the response. I’ll ask the deputy minister to start off the response.

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I’m sure we will be covering a lot of these issues as we go through the detail of the business plan, but I will touch on some of the comments.

Midwifery was brought up fairly consistently. We are rolling out a plan. We have midwifery, yes, and we’ve had midwifery, yes, for quite a while, but we have a community midwifery program. We are trying to expand that into a regional midwifery program and ultimately a territorial midwifery program. We see quite a difference between a community midwifery program which is successful and a regional and then ultimately a territorial...

Yes I would, Madam Chair.

That is something I would take back to my department. I know there are no shelters or any type of homes targeted specifically for persons with disabilities. There is not, where such a category exists. There are categories of housing designed to accommodate persons with disabilities, but there are no programs targeted only for persons with disabilities.

Although I was not involved in the original decision to bring the shelters to the larger centres, I can assume that the shelters were based on people who were considered to be absolute homeless versus relatively homeless. What happens is, essentially people who are absolutely homeless are people who have absolutely no place to call their own and the relatively homeless people actually don’t have a place to call home but do have a place to live, such as people who sleep on couches, as the Member indicated. Why we don’t have shelters in all of the communities is largely due to the cost.