Am I? Okay.
I know the summary says that, despite increased spending, the department hasn't met its targets—the DRIs. However, I'm looking at the DRIs and wondering what this actually means.
I'll give you some of the DRIs.
For the percentage of first nations adults who rate the quality of health care services delivered in their community as good or excellent, the target is 57%. The actual results are 55.2%. However, there's a little asterisk there that says data is five years old, because the data is collected from the first nations regional health survey and that's every five years. They haven't done it in five years.
The next one is the percentage of prior approval requests for medication coverage completed within 24 hours, and the target for that is 100%. What kind of administrator creates a target of 100%? Nobody is going to get to 100%. This might be my somewhat cynical view of administrators: Set a target you can easily meet and, when you meet it, claim success. If I have any criticism, it would be this: Why would you create a target of 100%, which is unachievable? However, they actually met 98.4%. Okay, they didn't meet their target, but come on. That's pretty close.
Another one is the percentage of eligible first nations and Inuit who received at least one non-insured health benefit in a year, which has a target of 74%. In the results for 2020-21, it was 67%, but that's during the time of COVID. You looked at non-insured health benefits like dental and psychological care, which means going from wherever you live to some other community. Who's going to want to do that?
The next one is the percentage of first nations adults who reported being in very good or excellent health, which has a target of 44%. The result was only 38.7%—but, again, it was five-year-old data.
As I go through these, nothing jumps out to me as being very bad, or “We're not meeting the indicators and we spent a lot of money.” What indicators did we go awry on and clearly didn't meet? The ones I'm looking at.... They are hard for me to get too excited about.