Tom Beaulieu

I don’t have the actual recommendations from ABC with me here today; however, I do know that the plan is not to continue any work on the pharmaceutical strategy until after the end of this fiscal year due to other priorities in the department.

Mr. Speaker, yes, I will commit to providing the information to the Member of this House. Thank you.

From my understanding, we are moving about 11,000 patients annually through medical travel, so the last number that I have from the Stanton Hospital annual general meeting was that the no-shows are 12 percent. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document, entitled Government of the Northwest Territories Response to Motion 4-17(2), Improving Drug and Alcohol Programs. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the Member is correct; the drug-resisting infections cost the community and health system billions of dollars yearly. MRSA is not a nationally reportable infection.

What we are doing is requesting information just from other jurisdictions to see what is happening, like trying to look at the best practices on a national level to see if we could employ the best practices here in the Northwest Territories by seeing how other jurisdictions are handling similar issues pertaining to this virus across the country. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, as I indicated earlier, drug-resistant infections cost a tremendous amount to the health care system. I think that these are clinical decisions made by doctors and that is their decision, is to not over-prescribe a certain drug into the system due to the fact that the virus or infection may be able to build up an immunity to that drug, then that is something that the department will follow. These decisions are clinical and then we try to take the advice of clinicians. Thank you.

Like I indicated, the public health officer will work with the authorities, and recognizing that we will advise the communities on the risks of the disease and what type of factors that create an atmosphere in which this virus can spread. Overcrowding is one of the key situations due to the close contact from individual to individual when you have houses that are overcrowded. In some cases, a lot of washing and so on needs to occur and when you have water delivery in the small communities sometimes you don’t have access to as much water necessary to do all of the cleanliness necessary, like as...

The whole plan is all about prevention. We are trying to help people to sober up so that they lessen their use of the health system. What we think is common knowledge is that sober people are healthier, and there are serious problems with alcohol and that it has a heavy price tag on the health system. Generally, the way we view this is that the nature of the whole action plan is going to be on prevention. Thank you.

In the action plan, detoxification, I think, is the first gap that is identified in there. Our intention is to try to have people go through detoxification without necessarily building infrastructure for them to do it in. I think the intention would be to go to more programming than anything. Also, we have some confidence that if an individual wants to quit using drugs or quit using alcohol, that they will stop and go through their own personal detoxification. We have to have some confidence that people that wish to quit drinking, will quit drinking, and that at some point down the road they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The intention of this forum initially was to have the forum around December, depending on how much information we are able to gather. Although we thought we had a structure in mind on the forum, now we’re considering the deliberations that have occurred during Committee of the Whole and we’re looking at maybe changing the structure of the forum at this time.