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ITK president blasts Inuit health-care standards

Jose Kusugak says the quality of health care in Canada’s Inuit regions doesn’t meet the standards set out in the Canada Health Act

JIM BELL

Jose Kusugak, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, told the Romanow health care commission last week that the quality of health care in Canada’s Inuit regions is now so bad, the commission’s work is irrelevant to their needs.

"The health-care system you are reviewing barely exists in the Arctic. It is so far removed from our needs and our reality that as I read the commission’s interim report I often felt as though I was reading about a different country," Kusugak told the commission on March 26 at a public hearing in Montreal.

In April 2001, Premier Jean Chrétien appointed Roy Romanow, a former NDP premier of Saskatchewan, to head a one-person commission aimed at finding ways to fix Canada’s deteriorating health-care system.

After spending eight or nine months doing preliminary research, Romanow issued an interim report and then hit the road for a series of public hearings.

He’ll be in Iqaluit April 8, for a one-day hearing at the Navigator Inn. It’s open to the public.

But the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami has already told Romanow that many Inuit get less from Canada’s health-care system than any other group in the country.

"The Canada Health Act theoretically guarantees access for all to medically necessary services," Kusugak said last week. "For Inuit, that commitment is an unfulfilled promise."

Right now, the Canada Health Act states that all Canadians have the right to have medically necessary physician and hospital services covered by public health insurance.

It also says that all insured persons must have "reasonable access" to hospital and physician services, unimpeded by financial and other barriers.

Kusugak said Inuit and northern Canadians don’t even get that basic access now.

"There is a great gap in the quality of health care between North and South, and it is visible in two areas: firstly, the lack of basic programs and services for northern Canadians, and secondly, the absence of Inuit input when health policy is made," Kusugak said.

He told Romanow that money better spent on care and prevention now goes toward medical travel.

"Money that should be spent on screening and prevention, programs, developing community-based health-care services, telemedicine programs, or training Inuit doctors and nurses instead goes to airlines to shuttle people back and forth from regional and southern health centres," Kusugak said.

Many Inuit also "feel powerless and intimidated" by the current health-care system, Kusugak said, because of barriers created by language and geography.

As a result, some Inuit choose not to get the help they need: "They prefer to return home to die rather than undergo therapy in a strange land and language and even having to adapt to a whole different diet…. Surely this is not the equal access envisioned in the Canada Health Act."

Kusugak said that it’s a "regrettable oversight" that the commission has sought little or no Inuit opinion, and no information about Inuit health needs.

"I noticed with some concern that of the nearly 40 academic papers developed at the request of the commission, not one addressed Inuit issues related to health," Kusugak said.

He said that Inuit do not participate sufficiently in the development of health policies in their regions, but he pointed to the Labrador Inuit Health Commission as an example of how Inuit-run health services might work.

"Inuit are involved at all stages of the service delivery and the process works very well," Kusugak said of the Labrador experiment.

Labrador is the only Inuit region in Canada where an Inuit body manages aboriginal health-care funds that flow from the Non-Insured Health Benefits, or NIHB program.

However, Kusugak made no recommendations about the NIHB program, which pays for extra aboriginal medical expenses not covered by territorial and provincial medicare plans — such as medical travel, prescription drugs, and dental care.

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