Health care reform must include social factors, MD says

Health reform in Canada needs to include an examination of the social influences which continuously drag down the aboriginal population, says a Whitehorse doctor.

Health reform in Canada needs to include an examination of the social influences which continuously drag down the aboriginal population, says a Whitehorse doctor.

Ngoze Ikeji told her colleagues at last Friday afternoon’s session of the annual general meeting of the Yukon Medical Association (YMA) that the health care of aboriginal people is quite abhorrent.

It’s not a problem of access to health care services, she said, suggesting it is more a case of the tough living conditions many face every day.Ikeji said health care reform needs to include an assessment of what social factors keeping troubling the country’s aboriginal people.It’s like a doctor who pulls a victim from the river and performs CPR to revive them, only to have them fall back into the river, she said.

“You need to look back and see why they keep falling in,” Ikeji said in her brief address to introduce her motion, which was passed unanimously.

The motion reads: “The YMA encourages the CMA (Canadian Medical Association), the federal, provincial and territorial governments to focus attention on the social determinants of health as it applies to
aboriginal health in the context of the health care reform.”

Dr. Wayne MacNicol said there is a large segment of the population living with a state of health well below what most people would accept.

“I think this motion here is by far the most important motion we can support today,” MacNicol said.

Yukoners living in rural communities often face a sub-par social structure, and problems with early childhood development. Many live in substandard housing conditions, and can’t find work because there is none.

All the health care reform in the world won’t help unless there is an aggressive effort to identify and deal with the root of the problems facing the aboriginal population, MacNicol said.

Ikeji said there needs to be, for example, more emphasis on education so more aboriginal people finish high school and go on to post-secondary institutes to learn nursing and other professions.

Colleges and universities are setting aside positions specifically for aboriginal students but they’re not being filled, she said.

“The CMA is acutely aware of the unique challenges facing our first nations peoples, and the huge care gaps for those peoples individually and collectively,” CMA president Dr. Anne Doig said in her address to the delegates.

“The motion you passed this afternoon will help to ensure that HCT addresses those needs.

“It is very important that the perspective of patients and physicians from remote regions is included in the HCT project.”

Doig encouraged the Yukon’s medical community to get involved with the national organization’s push to transform health care.

More than 40 resolutions were adopted at the CMA’s annual meeting in Saskatoon last August, from which five key directions have been charted, she said.

“There are real issues facing the population in Canada’s North, and the CMA is committed to working with the YMA to address those issues.”