Robert Hawkins

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...

No, it didn’t seem quite clear. There may have been a position missing or something there. Could we clarify that? If we have 15 positions here, two to be determined, and this is headquarters, that’s minus eight. If I read this paper, there are 15. The paper I’m citing is the one. I just want to make sure.

Well, I disagree with the Minister’s assertion on that, because quite frankly, we don’t have a specialized program that deals with crack. That’s taking over a number of our areas in the community, and it’s becoming the drug of choice, which is a real shame.

Sending someone to intense treatment in a hospital is not an appropriate use of our hospital. Furthermore, when we describe it as “We send them to the mental health unit,” I wouldn’t typically want to describe someone who has a drug addiction problem and wants to seek treatment as having a mental health problem. I would say that’s someone...

Although I’m not on the clock, I thank you for giving me the chance to say, Yes, I’ll take that information. I certainly would hope that every other Member on this side of the House would receive the offer of that package of information the Minister had offered.