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By Teena Monteleone

Hope and the Future

Hope and the Future: Progress in Northern health

Dec 23, 2020 | 8:00 AM

The COVID-19 pandemic makes 2020 a year many may prefer to forget, but there is hope for the future. We’ve decided to make that the focus of our series of end-of-year stories.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented turmoil to our healthcare system, it has also forced significant progress to be made in deploying additional supports to northern communities.

The Medical Health Officer for the Northern Intertribal Health Authority (NITHA), Dr. Nnamdi Ndubuka said there has been an increase in virtual clinics and the use of remote technology to deliver health services over the past year, including the deployment of more ‘Doc-in-a-box’ through the pandemic period.

“There has also been an increase in physician services through our partners with Northern Medical Services and the Saskatchewan Health Authority,” Ndubuka said. “We’ve also seen an increase in access to COVID-19 testing through the deployment of point-of-care testing devices across several reserve communities in the North.”

The pandemic has also taught many lessons in communication and brought to light the need for more collaboration across jurisdictions. Ndubuka said there is a need for all agencies involved in provincial responses to work together and share information since there is ‘no cookie cutter approach to managing a COVID outbreak.’

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“Intervention in one community may not necessarily work elsewhere. So there has to be a way to ensure we’re developing culturally relevant responses that would be acceptable to each community – recognizing that each community is unique,” he said.

Ndubuka praised the strong community leadership including chiefs and councils for responding to the pandemic and containing the virus.

Dr. Nnamdi Ndubuka is the Medical Health Officer for the Northern Intertribal Health Authority. (submitted photo/Dr. Ndubuka)

The other lesson learned from the pandemic is the impact of social determinants of health. Even before COVID-19, Ndubuka said social, economic and health inequities have been the prevailing narrative in the North, but those longstanding inequities including access to health care and improved housing have now been amplified. He said during the pandemic it became evident that the ability to adequately staff health care centres to manage large increases in volume was their biggest challenge. So, they asked First Nation communities to cross train as many health staff as possible and encouraged communities to engage unlicensed health personnel in contact tracing investigations to allow the licensed personnel to focus more on the technically demanding tasks.

“Health staff across NITHA demonstrated a remarkable willingness to be a part of this work despite their own fears of COVID-19,” Ndubuka said. “The most important element of pandemic preparedness is a vigilant health system that would rapidly detect cases, do assessment and contact trace and respond effectively to infectious disease. So, our communities are continuing to navigate and build capacity around those key elements.”

Looking ahead, NITHA’s main focus will be continuing to work with provincial partners to ensure First Nations are prioritized in the COVID-19 vaccine allocation. Ndubuka said they’ll work with Indigenous Services Canada counterparts and northern communities to increase vaccine optics, recognizing there may be hesitancy and misinformation.

“So, our focus would be to work around this to ensure we provide communities with factual information and also promote vaccine delivery. We’ll also continue to build system capacity to respond to the surge we anticipate in the coming year,” Ndubuka said.

Ultimately, he said, they look forward to declaring the pandemic over in the coming year.

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Teena.Monteleone@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @MonteleoneTeena