VANCOUVER, BC—Canada’s healthcare system is ineffective when it comes to serving Indigenous patients. The reason is because there has been a “lack of Indigenous governance over the way in which health services are designed and delivered.”
Those are the words of Dro. John O’Neil, professor and dean of the Health Sciences Faculty at Simon Fraser University. In an Op-Ed column in the Winnipeg Free Press, O’Neil writes that although there have been partial attempts to transfer portions of the health care system to First Nations and Inuit control over the past few decades. But it was not until October 2013, with the creation of the First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia, that “the first comprehensive, province-wide transfer of responsibility for health care from the federal government to First Nations finally occurred.”
O’Neil spent two years living in a remote Inuit community in the Arctic as a graduate student. It was there that he studied the effect of the “recently opened federal health clinic on community health practices.”
As a result, he published a report in 1981 entitled The Need for Community Control over Health Care in a Canadian Inuit Community which explains how he came to the conclusions he did about the ineffectiveness of our national healthcare system in serving Indigenous peoples.
Dr. O’Neil led a team of researchers at Simon Fraser and the First Nations Health Authority in a study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research “to document the transformational changes taking place in B.C. First Nations health care.”
“We interviewed senior leadership in the health authorities and B.C. health ministry, First Nations community health directors and a range of senior staff and board members at FNHA. The results of this study are overwhelmingly positive.”
However, there are still challenges, according to Dean O’Neil, “the overwhelming sentiment from these leaders was that the FNHA needed the full support of the health care community if the health disparities prevalent in communities were to finally be addressed.”
He encouraged leaders and researchers to “focus on how this model advances the integration of provincial and First Nation health services, a first for this country.”
