KENORA — The head of an Indigenous-led health care centre in Kenora says new data should help secure additional funding for its work.
Waasegiizhig Nanaandawe’iyewigamig, or WNHAC, is one of the local health care organizations involved in recent work by Toronto-based researcher Octavia Wong that used data from Our Health Counts to document the experiences of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people in several Ontario cities, including Kenora and Thunder Bay.
The research looked at rates of diabetes, prescription opioid use and the prevalence of people experiencing discrimination when accessing health care.
“We're hoping to utilize some of the information that we get from studies like this to help increase the success rate of our proposal to the government to really help fund providing Indigenous health back into Indigenous hands,” WNHAC chief operating officer Melissa Calder said, adding that the province is taking funding proposals for primary health care.
“It's difficult to study Indigenous populations, because there's just a lot of things that … people don't trust.”
Access to more funding would give Indigenous-led health care providers more tools to serve their populations, Calder said.
“It means that we are able to provide traditional medicines along with Western medicines, we are able to bring health back into communities, meet people where they're at, really put the client first and be client-driven rather than provider-driven,” she said.
“We spend more time with people, build relationships and not just prescribe medication because that's the easy way to do things,” Calder continued.
“But to really get to know people and know their families, know their histories, and really make sure that we're, first of all, hiring in as many Indigenous providers as we can to have people feel safe with those who they're in a room with and trusting their health care with.”
Wong’s research noted that just over 51 per cent of adult Indigenous respondents in Kenora told Our Health Counts they use traditional medicine or practices “to maintain … health and wellbeing.” The combined average among respondents in Kenora, Thunder Bay, Hamilton, London and Toronto was 46.4 per cent.
Wong said her research and the areas it’s targeting has been driven by the communities themselves and what local experts wanted to see probed more thoroughly.
“It was very much community first and those are things that I think other bodies might not be looking at as much,” she said.
“They might just be focusing more on what the government is interested in, but we want to make sure that it's representative of the community.”