Tom Beaulieu

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, would like to recognize the social work students from Aurora College, Kelly Bothamley and Jacqueline Brasseur, as well as their instructor, Susan Fitzpatrick, for the Social Work Program.

I’d also like to recognize the Page from Lutselk’e, Darian Marlowe.

I agree that medical travel is more of travel where the costs at one time used to be costed out or spent or expended authority by authority, but Stanton is running the medical travel. The Stanton Territorial Hospital is running the medical travel and they’re saying that it does create part of their deficit. It’s a large chunk of their expenditures – the biggest chunk, actually, when we divide it into certain sections – but it is being reviewed. That’s the reason we have brought staff in to review it, to make sure that these costs that should be charged to other authorities are charged to other...

Thank you. Yes, we’d like to provide the same care to the people that have the same clinical needs. So if the clinical needs in one hospital are the same as the clinical needs in another hospital, then the care will be provided on an equal basis. Thank you.

Thank you. The outpatients are not given priority over in-patients. Again, all patients are prioritized. There are more outpatients, there’s no question about that. People in the hospital, mostly the extended care people, are receiving physiotherapy from one physiotherapist and we have seven physiotherapists that are doing the outpatients. So based on clinical need and also given priorities given to patients who are unable to go back to work because of issues where they would need some physiotherapy in order to get back into the workforce, but they’re not given priority over in-patients.

I’m assuming that the Member has the information that those rates of exams or tests are lower than in the larger centres. I don’t have that information here. I think the standard, when we try to do cancer awareness or try to do early detection, is to try to do something that’s standard across the territory, except for in situations where communities are considered to have a spike in cancer rates in their specific communities. We try to work with those communities to look at all the cancer rates, but the standard is that we are supposed to be applying the same across the Territories regardless...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Health does a lot of work in the cancer area, and the department has developed a cancer awareness and response strategy that was funded during this fiscal year, and we have been doing work in various areas under the chief public health officer. I guess that’s how we’re trying to respond to the cancer awareness. Thank you.

Yes. I would commit to completing the assessment for the need of long-term care beds in Hay River and try to move that to the capital planning process as soon as possible.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’ve said in this House many times that we are going to do everything possible to keep the seniors in their home communities as much as possible. The only time we wish to move seniors is when there is no long-term care available in their communities and they have to go to long-term care, then we will sometimes move them to another long-term care facility. For the most part, the idea is to keep people as close to home as possible.

Thank you. I see the HPV advertisements on the television, I notice that they’re put on by the Nunavut government and I don’t know that the Government of the Northwest Territories has the same type of campaign for HPV. But I know that awareness of the types of cancer that we find most prevalent are the ones that we’re trying to campaign as in colorectal, prostate and lung cancer for men, and colorectal, lung and breast cancer for women. Thank you.

The Member will be able to see it as a line item in the capital plan once it goes through the capital planning process in this House.