Robert Hawkins

How long has this been going on, in the sense of this training process? Have we lost any who had to return to their home position per se? When I say “Have we lost any,” I mean: how many have we lost who have gone back to being RNs, unable to practice as an NP, and how many have left the North because they couldn’t find an NP position? Furthermore, what protects our investment on that, if we’re training nurses who won’t go to a community, and there are no existing NP positions they will take and they end up leaving?

Thank you. I’ll accept that. On the positions that were deleted, could you highlight exactly what positions they were? If I understand it, the Aboriginal Wellness came in and two new dialysis positions. Were there any losses in this calculation, just for the official record? I was having trouble hearing that.

The question is still outstanding: do they lose their credentials if they’re not in a practitioner position?

Thank you, Mr. Elkin, for that. I have to tell you it got muddled in there. I was trying to get a sense of the dialysis positions. Were they lost or gained?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I may seek some clarity on the Nurse Practitioner Program that we started: I don’t think I received a full answer in regard to how many we train. It may have been picked up somewhere else through another person’s question. My question specifically — and even if it’s for my own benefit, that is, Mr. Chairman — is: does the Minister know how many nurse practitioners we continue to train, and how many we have positions available for? The reason I’m asking it in that way is.... Are we training more nurse practitioners than we have positions available for?

How many unfunded positions do we have?

I thank the deputy minister for that detail. As I understand it, for better or for worse there are nurse practitioners out there on term positions. They haven’t been made permanent, in other words.

That said, I’m under the understanding that this section, through this type of program, goes out to continue to find more potential nurses to become nurse practitioners who we don’t have jobs for. As I understand it, the situation is that you need to be a practising nurse practitioner in order to keep your credentials active and useful. It’s not a question of losing typical RN status. It’s more in...

Thank you to the Minister and the staff for that answer. That’s the type of answer. It sounds like someone put some thought into it.

A number of Members are concerned about the approach we’ve used. Quite often that seems to be the answer that’s missed — how someone did some analysis on potential workload and where they can do this. That’s caused a lot of frustration and some pushback that not just this Minister but all those Ministers over there should be receiving so we get that type of detail.

The frustration we’re receiving here is that…. My fear is, the fear in the public — whether it’s the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Under the third paragraph down we have a section highlighted under the recruitment....

I appreciate, and I’ll make special recognition of, the fact that the Minister’s instructions were probably to ensure that whatever impact was going to happen…. I’m sure they were, to some degree, not focused on making sure we created as few ways as possible. I’ll recognize that’s probably an assumption on my part, but I would think that any reasonable person would say, Let’s try to make this as seamless as possible. Assuming that, we would have to come down to a reason as to why these specific positions were chosen over others.

With approximately 117 positions within the headquarters region of...