Jennifer McPhee
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 15/02) - Nunavummiut lack basic health-care services that Southerners take for granted, Nunavut Health Minister Ed Picco told the Romanow Commission last Monday.

"Our health-care needs are not about reforming an existing system, but about building the system and striving to provide basic health-care services," said Picco.

Roy Romanow, a former premier of Saskatchewan, is travelling around the country holding public consultations on how to reform Canada's health-care system.

During his two-and-a half-day stay in Nunavut, he also toured Baffin Regional Hospital and the health centre in Panniqtuuq.

Picco started his presentation by reeling off a list of appalling statistics about the health of Nunavummiut.

"This is typical of what is seen in poor and developing countries with high birth rates, high infant mortality, high rates of infectious diseases and overall death rates," he said.

"This is unacceptable in a G8 country," he suggested, referring to the world's top eight free-market economies.

Lack of infrastructure, old equipment and chronic staffing problems mean the department sends patients to Southern hospitals more often than it should, Picco explained to Romanow.

That, he said, leaves unilingual Inuit like fish out of water and wastes valuable funds.

"It would be like you, Mr. Commissioner, having to go to Japan for health-care services," said Picco.

Travel alone costs the health department $28.5 million out of a $146-million budget. And though Nunavut is the highest-paying jurisdiction, Picco said he can't compete with other regions for medical staff in the midst of national shortages.

He also criticized the federal government for creating aboriginal programs that exclude Inuit, pointing to the recent $125-million program for children with fetal alcohol syndrome. The initiative targets aboriginal children on reserves.

"That's asinine," said Picco. "The bureaucracy in Ottawa doesn't know what happens North of the Rideau Canal."

Change funding formula

Part of the solution lies in changing federal funding so it's based on need, not on population or per capita funding, said Picco.

"Right now, bodies are flowing down the river.

The government is picking them out of the water and doing autopsies. We want to go upstream and stop the bodies from falling in," he said.

Picco also said more federal funds for telehealth services would help give Nunavut's population -- spread across a fifth of Canada's land mass -- access to quality service.

He pointed to a recent example involving 12 people with a serious skin infection.

Normally, this would mean medevacing all 12 to Iqaluit. Using telehealth, patients were observed, monitored and diagnosed remotely. Just three were medevaced.

"It can be a life-saver," said Picco. "But we are in the infancy stage right now with telehealth. We're still taking baby steps." After listening to Picco and others, Romanow said he faces the daunting task of writing "a set of recommendations so strong and so powerful that no government could say no."

His report to the federal government is due in November.