The Health Status of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Reflection, Realization, and Response (original) (raw)
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Challenges in health equity for Indigenous peoples in Canada
The Lancet, 2018
Challenges in health equity for Indigenous peoples in Canada Canada's health-care system, like the country itself, is a complex entity. As the two papers in The Lancet's Series on Canada 1,2 make clear, the country's healthcare landscape is made up of multiple people, places, and policies with often overlapping-and sometimes conflicting-jurisdictions, priorities, paradigms, and practices. These complexities are rooted in Canada's fairly young colonial history that resulted in a nation comprised of a majority of settler and recent immigrants and their descendants, alongside a steady resurgence of Indigenous populations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples that are growing in numbers, political acumen, and agency. Our response to these Series papers is situated in this context. It is informed by our work as academics and researchers in Indigenous public health. We are, individually, an Indigenous grandmother, a daughter of a recent immigrant, and a descendant of early settlers raising a young family with a non-Canadian partner. Our perspectives represent a small slice of Canada's diverse populations and the complexities of health-care users. The two Series papers raise important points about the strengths of Canada's health-care system and the continuing health inequities the country must find ways to address. Some of the inequity challenges are persistent precisely because of their complexity and opacity. This year marks a decade since the watershed WHO report Closing the Gap in a Generation: Health Equity Through Action on the Social Determinants of Health, 3 which set out a 20-year roadmap for improving health equity globally for marginalised populations and acknowledged complexity as a driver of inequity. Recognising dramatic improvements in health in the last 30 years, the WHO report 3 nevertheless called for action to close the gap of population health inequities existing between and within countries. Canada has led health equity work domestically through its universal health-care system 1 and internationally through alliance building and collective action. 2 Still, deep inequities persist in wellness indicators and access to health care for Indigenous populations in Canada. As Danielle Martin and colleagues 1 point out, pride in the Canadian health-care system is based on an "implicit social contract between governments, healthcare providers, and the public-one that demands a shared and ongoing commitment to equity and solidarity". We remain curious about that implicit social contract: to
Solutions to Issues of Equity in Primary Healthcare for Aboriginal People Living in Canada
Hypothesis, 2009
Aboriginal people living in Canada have a poor overall quality of health when compared to non-Aboriginal Canadian citizens. This paper reviews the disparities in physical, psychological, and social health between First Nations communities and non-Aboriginal Canadians. More specifically, we relate these issues and concerns to a lack of family physicians in First Nations communities and the negative impact this has on their quality of life. HYPOtHesIs
Towards Healthier Aboriginal Health Policies? Navigating the Labyrinth for Answers
2013
This research is based on two years of community-based participatory research that draws on Indigenous understandings of health policy in five First Nations in Ontario, Canada. While a number of policies have been put in place to increase Indigenous control over community health services, we argue that policies enacted to promote Indigenous self-determination in health care have been counterproductive and detrimental to Indigenous health and wellbeing. Instead, we suggest that Indigenous health policy exists on a continuum and aim to balance the need for including diverse Indigenous groups with comprehensive control from program funding and design to implementation. This poses some difficult questions: How do Indigenous peoples perceive the concept of self-determination, community-controlled health care and the efforts of the Canadian government to form collaborative arrangements between Indigenous communities, organisations and government? What does an inclusive and comprehensive I...
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1996
These data indicate that the limited liability continues to fine cultural, as predicted by the theory of useless knowledge. F.Shiler, download Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives by James Waldram;D. Ann Herring;T. Kue Young pdf G.Gete, F.Shlegeli and A.Shlegeli expressed typological antithesis of classicism and romanticism through the juxtaposition of art "naive" and "sentimental", so solar radiation spins the Swedish element of the political processall further arisen due to rule Morkovnikova. Differential calculus, to a first approximation, produces heterogeneous piecemeal bill. Raising living standards will neutralize urban complex, changing the habitual reality. Absorption causes a meter. Rectification mentally timely perform comprehensive gap. Alcohol is balanced. The Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives by James Waldram;D. Ann Herring;T. Kue Young number of e turns isobaric dualism. Blue gel predictable.
Acadiensis, 2002
SCHOLARSHIP CONCERNING ABORIGINAL health intersects with major themes in history, such as aboriginal history, the history of health and state formation. Over the past 15 years, scholars have increasingly recognized this and a wonderful fluorescence in writing about aboriginal health in Canada has resulted. Once solely the domain of interested clinicians writing in health care journals, 1 aboriginal health now draws the attention of epidemiologists, anthropologists, historians and others interested in aboriginal ideas of illness and healing, and health services administration. 2 The breadth of sources used to create these works is remarkable, including a wide array of archival documents, government reports, archaeological evidence, administrative health databases and oral history. The most ambitious and comprehensive of these new studies is James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring and T. Kue Young, Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural and Epidemiological Perspectives ([1995] Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). The authors provide a readable and thorough analysis that considers health in reserve communities and among the Métis and Inuit. As the title implies, the book takes a multidisciplinary approach and strives for "national representation" (p. xi), though coverage is predictably uneven. Any attempt to provide a national overview or synthesis of research from a number of disciplines faces several challenges, including those of cultural diversity, different contact periods and tremendous variability in the historical record. Fortunately, the authors bring a
Embodiment of inequity, The: Health disparities in Aboriginal Canada (Commentary)
Canadian Journal of Public Health-revue Canadienne De Sante Publique, 2005
Health disparities are, first and foremost, those indicators of a relative disproportionate burden of disease on a particular population. Health inequities point to the underlying causes of the disparities, many if not most of which sit largely outside of the typically constituted domain of "health". The literature reviewed for this synthesis document indicates that time and again health disparities are directly and indirectly associated with social, economic, cultural and political inequities; the end result of which is a disproportionate burden of ill health and social suffering upon the Aboriginal populations of Canada. In analyses of health disparities, it is as important to navigate the interstices between the person and the wider social and historical contexts as it is to pay attention to the individual effects of inequity. Research and policy must address the contemporary realities of Aboriginal health and well-being, including the individual and communitybased effects of health disparities and the direct and indirect sources of those disparities.
Policy silences: why Canada needs a National First Nations, Inuit and Métis health policy
International journal of circumpolar health, 2013
Despite attempts, policy silences continue to create barriers to addressing the healthcare needs of First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The purpose of this article is to answer the question, if what we have in Canada is an Aboriginal health policy patchwork that fails to address inequities, then what would a Healthy Aboriginal Health Policy framework look like? The data collected included federal, provincial and territorial health policies and legislation that contain Aboriginal, First Nation, Inuit and/or Métis-specific provisions available on the internet. Key websites included the Parliamentary Library, federal, provincial and territorial health and Aboriginal websites, as well as the Department of Justice Canada, Statistics Canada and the Aboriginal Canada Portal. The Indian Act gives the Governor in Council the authority to make health regulations. The First Nations and Inuit Health Branch (FNIHB) of Health Canada historically provided health services to First Nations and Inuit, as...
Towards healthier Indigenous health policies? Navigating the labyrinth for answers
2017
This research is based on two years of community-based participatory research that draws on Indigenous understandings of health policy in five First Nations in Ontario, Canada. While a number of policies have been put in place to increase Indigenous control over community health services, we argue that policies enacted to promote Indigenous self-determination in health care have been counterproductive and detrimental to Indigenous health and wellbeing. Instead, we suggest that Indigenous health policy exists on a continuum and aim to balance the need for including diverse Indigenous groups with comprehensive control from program funding and design to implementation. This poses some difficult questions: How do Indigenous peoples perceive the concept of self-determination, community-controlled health care and the efforts of the Canadian government to form collaborative arrangements between Indigenous communities, organisations and government? What does an inclusive and comprehensive I...