Just how seriously is the territorial government addressing accusations of racism within the health care system?
Reading what Stephanie Papik has to say, one could easily conclude the answer is – not very seriously at all.
Papik is the niece of Hugh Papik, a 67-year-old Inuvialuit elder who died two years ago after elders’ home staff and nurses in Aklavik reportedly thought he was drunk. He had actually suffered a stroke but died before he could reach Yellowknife for treatment.
Had staff at the elders’ home and Aklavik Health Centre taken his illness more seriously and medevaced him more promptly, who knows, he may have survived.
His family accuses the GNWT of presiding over a health-care system steeped in systemic racism and who could blame them?
In neighbouring Nunavut, a similar case was heard by a coroner’s jury concerning the 2013 death of Victor Kaludjak of Rankin Inlet, who died after visiting the health centre complaining of weakness and double vision with his eyesight.
The attending physician thought he was drunk and he went into cardiac arrest before he could be medevaced. Last year, a media outlet reported on how a Gitxsan First Nation man in northern B.C. suffering a stroke attended hospital four times before being taken seriously.
These stories indicate systemic racism is widespread, that Indigenous people in remote communities are particularly at risk and that they ought to be a high priority to remedy by government.
Alas, it has been more than a year since Manitoba physician Marlyn Cook offered 16 recommendations to the GNWT following Papik’s death aimed at eliminating racism from the health-care system. Cook is a member of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. She was brought in to investigate at the behest of Health Minister Glen Abernethy.
Some of her recommendations included increased representation by Indigenous health care workers and for cultural safety training based on an “anti-oppression framework.”
Abernethy vowed to fight “systemic racism” in the health-care system after receiving Cook’s report, but offered no time table on when the recommendations would be implemented.
As Papik suggested in last week’s News/North, it’s easy to interpret this open-ended inaction as merely code for “we’re not really going to do anything.”
Talk is cheap. It’s easy for one politician to label the system as “racist” and then order a review and forget about it.
There clearly are system-wide problems throughout Northern Canada where one health care worker’s lazy and ignorant assumption can spell a death sentence for a patient requiring an immediate medevac from a remote community. It’s up to governments, including ours, to address that and explain how they intend to fix it. And if not, explain why they can’t.
Not doing so will only harden opinion among Indigenous communities that no one really cares about their health, only how to conduct damage control when the public gets word of how it failed them.