I'd just like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing our voice to be heard from out here, and hopefully any information I can give can be of some assistance to you guys.
Basically, Heart River Housing is a non-profit management body established by the province to manage low-income family housing, provincially owned buildings and lodges. We are not, generally speaking, in the health care business. We do have four lodges in our area.
Our area runs from the community of Fox Creek, Valleyview, all the way down to High Prairie and Slave Lake. Most of our communities are under 2,500 people, so again, we're a very small, spread out area. I think we cover over 40,000 square kilometres of area within our region.
We are also very close to five first nations and three Métis settlements that call High Prairie and Slave Lake their main trading centre, so we do have lots of interaction with the first nations in our region. Eighty per cent of our family housing units have indigenous families in them, so again, our record of working with indigenous families and peoples is really, I think, very good.
On the seniors side, we are seeing more seniors coming into our lodges, who we are trying to accommodate on the cultural side, but again, right now there is not that.... We are concerned about why they are not coming in. I do understand the concept of not leaving home and I can appreciate everything that Mr. Cutfeet has explained about seniors not wanting to leave their supports, although our communities are very close with the bands and the settlements, and I think there is a bit more flexibility in that area.
On the long-term care side of things, the community of High Prairie just had a 64-bed long-term care facility built. They had talked about it taking up to five years before it would be full and it took about three and a half months until all the beds were full. Again, that puts a lot of pressure back on the seniors lodge facilities because we are delivering level 2 care to our facilities. We would be open to delivering level 3 care in a more home-type environment versus an institution. I can appreciate what my former colleague said about moving people to an institution-type setting. Our lodges are not like that. We consider them homes and we try to make them as comfortable as possible without having a hospital-type setting.
We manage about 900 units, and 175 of those are seniors lodge facilities. About 125 are seniors apartments. Again, our experience and our workload on the health side of things is not as deep as we would like it to be because we think we could be of more help.
I am going to cut my time short there and open it up for some questions after if I can be of some support.