Nova Scotia's health minister says he will decide within a few weeks whether to have patients at the East Coast Forensic Hospital wear GPS tracking devices.

“I'll be sitting down this week and I'm basically saying look, within a couple of weeks we'll have this out the door as to which direction we will take,” says Health Minister Leo Glavine.

Over the past year, Glavine’s department has been considering that option as a way to deal with patients who don't return from community visits when they're supposed to.

It was prompted by the number of times patients have failed to return while out on community visits.

In 2014, 40 patients were AWOL, or absent without leave. Of those 40, 18 were spot checks, patients on community access passes, who weren't where they were supposed to be even for as little as 15 minutes and 19 were AWOL for less than four hours. Three others were missing for more than four hours.

The department has been looking at a monitoring system in the United Kingdom which involves ankle bracelets, GPS tracking, that's monitored 24/7.

The health minister says one thing he has learned is the patients involved in the UK are different from those at the East Coast Forensic Hospital. 

“Many of the patients that they were using from the UK study and report were people with more mental challenges,” says Glavine.

Glavine says GPS tracking was a recommendation from the family of Raymond Taaval, who died in 2012. The man charged in his death was on a one-hour pass from the forensic hospital at the time.

Dr. Aileen Brunet is the clinical director at the forensic hospital. She says changes have been made as a result of the external review following Taaval's death, including things like the definitions of being AWOL and suspending community access for 72 hours once someone has returned from one.

“We've also implemented a risk assessment tool to try and examine ahead of time, where it’s possible, whether someone might be at increased risk of going absent without leave,” says Brunet.

As for using tracking device, Glavine says no other jurisdiction in North America does this, but he isn't afraid of being the first, if it’s the right direction to go. That decision will come in the next few weeks.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Jacqueline Foster