Western health care joins with Indigenous knowledge

Niagara Health Indigenous programming manager Charity Beland said it’s also a big part of the work her team is involved in at Niagara’s hospitals.

“We want to make sure the western medicine is there, but we want to make sure we’re supporting it with some other alternative things that we know work for our people and expanding and continuing to expand in that way. It’s not only physical,” Beland said.

“We’re trying really hard to make sure that everyone has an understanding of just how important those other areas of a person are and the impact that has on your healing. We try hard to focus on the individual. Who they are and what they’re comfortable with.”

She said Niagara Health’s Indigenous health team works with patients to ensure their culture and traditions are reflected in the care they receive.

“If there are things they’d like to learn about, if they know their nation or maybe they don’t know about some of the teachings, we’re happy to connect them with an elder who can help guide and support some of those things. We always explain that we’re able to smudge in the hospital,” she said, referring to the burning of herbs as part of traditional Indigenous healing.

“It kind of breaks you out of, ‘OK, I’m stuck in a hospital,’ and you have the smell of the medicine, and you get to change the air and the feeling and the energy around you when you go into something like that. Even when we have drumming and singing that we provide, it just changes the space and the energy for people.”

Roslynn Baird, chief executive officer of the Niagara-based Indigenous Diabetes Health Circle, said spirituality is a “huge part” of the healing process in Indigenous tradition.

“We look to our elders for advice every step of the way. Our elders provide us with that spiritual guidance in our programming and how we deliver our services,” Baird said.

She said it’s a matter of looking at a whole person, “holistically, and not just what’s wrong with them.”

While spiritual healing might be discarded by a scientific approach to health care, Baird said it’s “definitely an area that is grounded in our beliefs.”

“There has been a lot of scientific studies that back up a lot of the things that we know. Those things, a lot of the things that our elders teach us, are now becoming scientific knowledge,” she said, adding a lot of traditional teachings were lost because of Canada’s residential school system.

She said the Indigenous medicine wheel looks at the mental, spiritual, physical and emotional aspects of an individual, and all those elements “need to be in present for a balance of health.”

“It’s a very simple prescription to be in balance. If you’re mentally well, you’ll be physically well. If you’re physically well, you have the capacity to be spiritually well. That balance is so important,” Baird said.

Despite more than a century of working to obliterate Indigenous culture in Canada through programs such as residential schools, Baird said those teachings have endured.

“It’s that loss of culture, loss of spirituality, it’s directly tied to health care,” she said. “There was no diabetes pre-colonization that we knew of at all. It’s not just food, it’s not obesity or stress. It’s a loss of spirituality, it’s culture. We’re so much more as human beings than we give ourselves credit for.”

While her organization is focused on diabetes among Indigenous people, she said, the occurrence of the disease is rising among people of every culture and every area in North America.

Niagara Health unveiled its first Indigenous health services and reconciliation plan in May, developed through numerous meetings with individuals, families and Indigenous community leaders to determine the changes that were needed while developing a road map to implement them.

“We really took the time to listen to what the challenges were, what they were identifying, what community members were experiencing, so we could pull priorities,” said Beland.

“That’s essentially what the plan is. It’s a list of priorities that the community has identified.”

Beland said her team has been hard at work in the months since the plan was unveiled, implementing changes to ensure Indigenous patients receive care that is sensitive to their unique cultural and health-care needs.

“It’s been a crazy year. Lots going on,” she said. “We have been able to move forward on so many of the initiatives we know are really important to the community.”

A few of those initiatives include commissioning Indigenous artists to create works for the region’s hospitals and developing a community space to allow people to meet for things like traditional parenting or healing circles.

Beland said discussions with the Indigenous community will continue, as the priorities identified in the plan are addressed.

“We have the next four years to continue to sit with the community and try and pull out how we really build what the plan is, to action — supporting some of those areas,” she said. “The engagement is ongoing and will be forever, because we need the community to lead with what they’re experiencing and how they would like to see it resolved.”

Beland described her team as “the middlemen,” acting as the liaison between the Indigenous community and hospital administration while working to ensure the hospitals provide a place where community members feel safe.

The 24-year-old Indigenous woman died of a staph infection at St. Catharines hospital on Dec. 9, 2021, after waiting untreated for hours in the hospital emergency department.

In the meantime, Beland said, her team continues “doing the work we need to do” to ensure Indigenous patients receive the care they need.

And for the most part, she said, community members are “happy and supportive that we’re taking these steps and it’s community members in the organization that are leading the work, and now we’re just making sure we’re able to deliver on the things that we say we’re going to do.

“Niagara Heath is supporting us in that work, and the community is involved in it along the way. It’s a lot on us to make sure we’re being transparent and we’re reporting a sharing information with the community and that we’re making sure Niagara Health is going to continue to walk along side of us.”

Baird said the Niagara Health’s Indigenous health services and reconciliation plan is a good start, as well as a “heartfelt” apology that was broadcast online last week from the Canadian Medical Association after more than a century of dismissing the cultural and traditional teachings of Indigenous medicine.

But without meaningful action, she said, they’re just words.

“Strategies are great, documents are great, but there needs to be teeth. There needs to be action,” Baird said.

So far, Beland said, hospital leadership, as well as doctors and other patients, have been fully supportive of the Indigenous health services and reconciliation plan.

“They’re really listening to what we’re saying, and we’re really listening to what the community is saying and what we see our community members experiencing inside (the hospitals),” she said. “It’s really exciting to know that we’re able to lead this work, and we’re able to lead it not only in Niagara, but we’re setting a standard across hopefully the province and the country.”

But, Beland said, there’s room for improvement.

She said she hopes to expand the five full-time members and one casual member of the Indigenous health services team.

Currently, she said, a typical day for team members is “chaos.”

“It’s chaos, just because every day is so different. We really don’t know if we’ll be spending our time with the women’s and babies (program), maybe we’ll be spending our time in mental health, maybe everybody will be all over the place trying to do all of the things because we work at all sites,” she said. “We try to support any site that needs us.”

She said the program “100 per cent” needs more staff to meet the needs.

Beland, however, said she’s confident hospital administration will provide the resources the program needs.