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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
A Fort Smith nurse-practitioner is pleased with a report on the role of Canadian nurses that she helped create over the past year.

Julie Lys, a Fort Smith nurse-practitioner, was the only Northern representative on the Canadian Nursing Association's National Expert Commission, which recently released a report titled A Nursing Call to Action. - NNSL file photo

"I think it came out really well and I hope that nurses will use it for kind of a blueprint of what we can do, and ask themselves every day what can we do in our communities and how can we make this work," said Julie Lys.

She is a member of the Canadian Nursing Association's National Expert Commission, which prepared the report titled A Nursing Call to Action. It was presented to the association on June 18 at its convention in Vancouver.

Lys is optimistic the report will result in changes.

"It's about a focus on the community," she said of the report's overall theme. "It's not just on hospitals, because a lot of our health-care dollars go to acute care services. So you wait 'til the person gets sick and that's where the money goes, right? This calls for don't wait until they get sick. Let's do something before they get sick. Let's put some of that money in the community."

Lys said the concept is to help people live well so they can stay out of the healthcare system.

The report calls for nurses to work with other community groups, something which Lys believes may be easier to do in the North.

"We have probably more potential to do it in the territories because we're smaller, we know each other," she said. "In a smaller community, all those resources are there, but it's connecting and making sure that we keep the clients at the centre of your care."

In fact, Lys noted, as she travelled around Canada as part of the expert commission, many people were interested in what has happened in Fort Smith, such as the Phoenix School - all alternative education setting established by Paul William Kaeser High School.

"Those kids now have a high school education and that's going to affect their life," she said.

Lys credits such positive developments in Fort Smith to an interagency group, which includes a wide variety of organizations.

An education is one of the things she refers to as a determinant of health. Others include such things as good housing, safe drinking water and understanding the effects of colonization on aboriginal people.

"To make any changes there, we need to all know how colonization has affected the clients that we serve, the communities and the health of the population," she said. "So having a better understanding of colonization, the concepts of it, what it did and how to change that is really key to looking at the core health issues of aboriginal populations."

Lys, who is of Metis heritage and the only person on the commission from the North, said her role was to connect with aboriginal people and to offer a perspective from North of 60.

"If you just took the aboriginal population out of the Canadian statistics, Canada looked quite good," she noted. "But when you put the aboriginal statistics in there, we fell way down the scale of health determinants in our idea of what health is. So that's a population that's really being left behind. It's not a big population, but there are a lot of needs, many of which have not been addressed."

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