Tom Beaulieu

As we take a look at the delivery model again, many of the functions that are in the authority like the public health, Healthy Families and public health nurse and so on are targeted towards early childhood development and are part of their functions. A part of many of the positions in the authority are addressing the early childhood development. We will make sure that any information that we get as a result of having Dr. Corriveau back in our employment will be given to the health and social services authorities.

Yes, Mr. Chairman. To my right I have the deputy minister, Debbie DeLancey, Health and Social Services. To my left I have the assistant deputy minister, Mr. Derek Elkin, Health and Social Services.

Mr. Chair, in the department we have one position, but most of the money to do early childhood development work is with the authorities, with the health and social services authorities across the North. I don’t have the detail of how many positions that constitutes.

Mr. Chair, as we travel to the communities, many of the Aboriginal communities that we had gone to have indicated to myself and the staff that was travelling with me when they wanted to take a look at treatment. As an example, that we should be working with the communities to develop a model which meant that if there were families that needed treatment, if there was youth that needed treatment, that they would be going out on the land with the elders and that they would be essentially living out there on the land for a period of time while they address their addiction issues. We had indicated...

In general, the governance, if we move to all regional advisory boards, there will be a greater focus on the involvement of communities, and that is the intention on the Beaufort-Delta board at this time. For the Stanton, what we would like to do – and it’s something that we’re going to take back to Standing Committee on Social Programs – is to have the seven regional chairs or public administrators, in other words the Joint Leadership Council, oversee the operations at Stanton, in effect having a territorial type of board that would be responsible for the Stanton Territorial Hospital.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This year, in this budget, our plan is to spend $4 million to complete the remaining schematic planning and the initial occupational planning. We can’t go beyond that. We have to have approval of this House to go beyond that. We’re moving forward in this area and this is part of the process, but I can’t anticipate what there’s going to be in the capital plan in future years.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We can provide that information.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That concludes Health and Social Services’ response to general comments.

Yes, I do, Madam Chair.

Aside from discussing healthy eating in the schools and dropping the pop, some exercise, talking to schools about people exercising, talking about walking with people, we’re also looking at carefully expanding the home care so that people with diabetes, that more attention is paid to people’s feet. With diabetes there are a lot of preventable amputations that do occur in the health system. Each amputation costs about $80,000 and there are numbers out there indicating that about 80 percent of those are preventable. If we can step up the home care to make sure that anybody that has diabetes who...