Have to admit it's getting better
(it couldn't get much worse)

Lack of services in Nunavut leaves disabled people with a grim choice: head south for treatment or suffer in silence. A new task force offers hope

By Jane George

"Do we feel ashamed because we don't get help?" asks Amme Kipsigak, a Rankin Inlet man with several physical disabilities. Anyone who looks at the situation Nunavut's disabled people face will quickly realize his poignant question is rhetorical.

More than 25 years after the first efforts to organize services for disabled Inuit in the Eastern Arctic, many of them still struggle to survive, suffering in silence from poverty and neglect. An estimated one third of Nunavut's 25,000 residents live with either a mental or physical disability.

Mr Kipsigak, a member of a new Nunavut task force on disabilities, says that though he sometimes has trouble following the discussion at meetings because of his hearing problems, he counts himself among the lucky ones. He doesn't have the strength to push a snowmobile � a major drawback in the North � but he's still managed to stay mobile and keep his job.

The new task force is the latest group looking at ways of improving the quality of life for people like Mr Kipsigak. They want more information on the number of disabled residents, where they live and what services they require.

Unfortunately, this precise information isn't available, since the last federal census of people 'with limitations,' taken a couple of years ago, overlooked Nunavut.

"Once we start scratching the surface there's going to be an infinite demand," says Dr Sandy MacDonald, Nunavut's medical director. "We'll never be able to meet the real need, but we can certainly do more and we should be providing the service here."

GOING FOR LOCAL
Currently many of Nunavut's disabled are forced to travel south to Ottawa, Winnipeg or Edmonton for proper care. Even communities like Iqaluit � the territory's relatively well-equipped capital � can't provide the special services and healthcare that those with disabilities require, such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy and home care. There are still some 50 mentally or physically disabled adults and children living outside Nunavut because their needs cannot be met at home.

Local rehabilitation services will help, but according to Judy Gane, Nunavut's new rehabilitation coordinator, they're "just being developed" in Iqaluit. Although there was a full-time audiologist at one time in the Baffin region, for the past six months there hasn't been, even though hearing impairment is one the most common disabilities.

The vacuum in rehab services hasn't been due to a lack of will or money, explains Dr MacDonald, but from a reorganization of the health portfolio after Nunavut separated from the Northwest Territories (NWT) five years ago. "The department was nothing when Nunavut was created. What it inherited from the NWT was a bureaucracy from the three regions that just kind of transferred on April 1 1999," he says. "What it lost was all the managers at the office level." This loss was then compounded by the dissolution of the three regional health boards, which had operated independently under the NWT.

Dr MacDonald is cautiously optimistic about the future. "I see good things, in that we're starting to think like a territory," he says. "It doesn't help you today, but I think the department is truly trying to address the issues, so the frustrations now are dealing with the reality of recruiting."

Dr MacDonald believes that finding qualified staff with a commitment to working in Nunavut is the key to offering sustainable healthcare to the disabled. "We're not out of the woods by any means, but things are a little better."