Terry Halifax
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Aug 13/01) - South Mackenzie bureau chief Terry Halifax recently chatted with Health Minister Jane Groenewegen about health delivery challenges and the social agenda for the Northwest Territories.
 Jane Groenewegen |
Jane Groenewegen: I think it's always good when people get together to talk about issues. The North, by its nature, is remote and we don't get that many opportunities to discuss things face-to-face.
I think the social agenda conference brought together a unique mix of people. It had never been tried before, where we brought the leaders together with members of service organizations, front line workers to touch on all aspects of social issues.
We've got some major challenges in the North that we haven't been able to address as effectively as we would like to. Being on the brink of so much opportunity and potential prosperity for the North, we have to address these issues.
N/N: You referred to these as "challenges," and often in the paper, we see these headlines saying crisis in health care, crisis in this or that. I think it's the Chinese who have the same word for crises as opportunity.
Why couldn't the North be seen as an opportunity to research things like FAS/FAE. Because we are a perfect Petri dish in our remote communities and such, couldn't we be on the forefront of research like that?
JG: There is a lot of research that could be done, but because we are so unique, I don't know who could potentially benefit from it.
The provinces also face many of the same issues when it comes to their Northern regions and we do collaborate with the province's health and social service ministers to make sure that we share information on best practices and programs that work.
You specifically mentioned FAS/FAE and we're very active in the Prairie/Northern Coalition on FAS and FAE.
That's where I sit down with my provincial and territorial counterparts and we talk about what kinds of campaigns, research, programs and services that they offer.
We, here in the North, are fairly progressive on that front, so they benefit from us being able to share that kind of information with them. We have some really pro-active non-government organizations that we work in partnership with and they play a very lead role in bringing innovative solutions to some of the challenges we face in the North.
I think it was in the Cuff Report that said that there has been a failure to really recognize the value of some of these non-government agencies.
I think that if youOre talking about Health and Social Services or any of the issues encompassed in those areas, we are pretty-much ahead of the trend nationally.
When you look at some of the provinces that have done system-wide reviews, like the federal government striking the Romanov Commission. We undertook our own system-wide review and we are probably the third or fourth jurisdiction in Canada to do that and produce a report.
I'm always quite proud of the system and the critical look that we take at how we do things. I think that we tend to get on a negative stream and we don't think about how really modern and how really innovative our system is. Given the things like remoteness and the lack of infrastructure like roads and things like that. It's quite amazing.
N/N: Are we ever going to get the federal government to recognize the distance between our people and our hospitals and that this per capita funding just doesn't work here?
JG: When that subject comes up, we do get a fair amount of support from places like the Maritimes.
We need something different for a threshold for sharing federal program monies other than per capita funding. What the federal government does, is, there's always a fair amount of fanfare around these announcements that they make for money that they plan to invest in certain areas. The reality is, that when it comes down to the per capita share that the Northwest Territories would get, it's very misleading to our people to think that we could possibly do anything significant with that amount of money. However, when you get into provinces like Ontario and Quebec, I mean, that is really quite significant dollars. People could see differences in things like home care, primary care or modernization of equipment. Whereas for us, it might only represent half the amount of money needed to buy a reasonably modern piece of equipment.
Are we ever going to get the message though to them? We certainly won't give up trying.
Our people deserve the best; they deserve no less than what other Canadians could expect.
In some regards, I think that Northerners -- although remote -- have better access in some instances to services. Where you hear of the very long waiting lists for diagnostic services or treatment in the south and because of the money that we spend on things like contract our capital health authority in Edmonton, Northerners get some pretty preferential treatment.
So we'll keep working on the federal government. I've personally spoken to Allan Rock about it and he, particularly, was fairly understanding of it. It takes a long time for things to play themselves out.
