Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Following up on my statement today, my first question to the Minister of Health and Social Services is I'm glad to see the Minister is focused on improving care and services in in the small communities. Will she commit to creating and implementing clear service standards that make community members can expect as part of the work her department is doing. Mahsi.
Thank you, Member from the Sahtu. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, within health and social services, there are core services -- standards do exist throughout the Northwest Territories but right now, what's happening is we are reviewing those and focusing on updating a lot of those core service standards to ensure better supports and guidance for health and social services authorities implementing these standards, and that's one of the things that we are focusing on. And hopefully that these recommendations from that review will help to move these next steps forward by this summer that we will have that finalized. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thanks to the Minister for that information and reply.
My next question to the Minister is the work plan developed with the public administrator promises improvements to the healthcare system within the year. What specific recruitment and retention targets, such as vacancy rate reductions, will the Minister use to measure success in small and remote communities and will she report those results publicly? Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, what we will be publishing right shortly is the people strategy which goes into detail on our updated plan for recruitment and retention that's guided by feedback from staff and residents. I'm looking forward to being able to brief standing committee on that strategy. While the success of this strategy is -- will not be seen instantly, it aims for this as to be continuous improvement and feedback from the staff. So one of the things with part of the question is assessing the progress in small and remote communities, so one of the key areas that we are striving to document is these vacancy rates. So in these frontline positions, so how long it takes to fill these positions, as well as responses to exit surveys, when employees leave our system, and we can use this data quarter -- to compare quarter to quarter, year to year, and so that we can see whether things are improving with the people's strategy. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. Final supplementary. Member from the Sahtu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thanks to the Minister for that information.
My last question, in my statement I noticed that -- I noted that fully staffed small communities relieve pressure on regional centres, on the territorial hospital as well. How will the Minister's department track and report the system's wide impact? Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, while there's limited access to care in small communities, patients often have to travel elsewhere. And with our limited, you know -- Members of this House have brought up many times other alternative measures that we are looking at right now as virtual care and also with the public administrator going into each of the regions to see what is actually needed and what can be implemented as soon as possible in those small communities that could help promote the health of the people in those communities while reducing their need to always have to travel into the regional centres. While improving service delivery and access is essential, we -- I totally agree that we need to make sure and to track the progress and impacts of those improvements. So our ongoing work to strengthen service in small communities includes building a robust, more monitoring, and reporting tools because that's something, you know -- in health, we continue to just go and find ways to resolve the issues and then we don't usually do a good thing because we're a 365-day, year, so those are things that we are working on. So the tools will allow us to measure performance. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Minister of Health and Social Services. Oral questions. Member from Great Slave.
