NR 02-21 ROM ENG Romanow Commission.doc
(NOVEMBER 29, 2002 — Iqaluit, Nunavut) Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. President Cathy Towtongie today praised the Health Care Commission effort to identify solutions to Canada’s chronic health care system problems. The final report of the commission, Building on Values: The Future of Health Care in Canada, was released on Nov. 28 in Ottawa.
NTI believes the best way to deal with Nunavut’s problems is through partnership and co-operation, Towtongie said. In our presentation to Mr. Romanow in April, we spoke of our frustration over the inadequate federal response to Inuit health problems. We criticized how the present approach treats Inuit as second-class citizens and keeps our territory’s health care system in a never-ending state of crisis.
NTI supports the Health Care Commission’s overall call for changes that will yield a sustainable system, particularly the recommendations for government to:
Take steps to ensure that rural and remote communities have an appropriate mix of skilled health care providers to meet their health care needs,
Address the diverse health care needs of Canadians, and
Establish a new Rural and Remote Access Fund to support new approaches for delivering health care services and improve the health of people in rural and remote communities.
Nunavut Inuit are taking an active role in improving the territory’s health care system by investing $20 million into three new regional hospitals, said Towtongie. We are already ahead of much of Canada when it comes to “integrated health care’ thanks to our reliance on nurse practitioners and home care in our communities – the issue for us is the adequacy of these services.
The establishment of a new fund for rural / remote health care needs would address the long standing funding problems the territory has faced as a result of per capita approaches for national programs that don’t recognize the lack of infrastructure and our extremely high costs in Nunavut, Towtongie added.
NTI noted that the commission’s recommendation to ensure that the health care system responds to the unique needs of official language minorities fails to address the reality of Nunavut, where 85 per cent of the population is Inuit but few health service providers speak Inuktitut.
In fact, the unique circumstances of Nunavut Inuit are overlooked in the commission’s recommendations for aboriginal health, which focus on the needs of First Nations, especially treaty Indians living on reserve, Towtongie noted.
