Province-wide study looks at First Nations nurses

In an effort to see more Aboriginal people in nursing, a team of researchers at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay has embarked on a province-wide study of nursing schools and the nursing profession.
The study, led by Dr. Bruce Minore of Lakehead’s Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research, focuses on interviewing Aboriginal nurses and Aboriginal nursing students to determine why such a relatively small proportion of nurses in Ontario are of First Nations or Metis descent.
Minore told Wawatay News that he hopes the results lead to province-wide recommendations on how nursing schools can better accommodate Aboriginal students, and how the profession as a whole can better attract and retain Aboriginal nurses.
“There is an emerging awareness of the importance of attracting Aboriginal people into health sciences generally, given the scarcity of Aboriginal nurses and caregivers,” Minore said. “This study is trying to identify what are the challenges, and what are the remedies for those challenges.”
Minore said that it is commonly understood that Aboriginal clients will benefit from having more nurses who share “some of their life experiences and worldviews.”
The challenge is that currently so few First Nations and Metis nurses are working in the province.
In part due to the limited number of Aboriginal nurses and nursing students, Minore said early indications from the study point to two major problems found in both hospitals and nursing schools: either Aboriginal nurses and students are seen as all-knowing, because they understand the cultural background of the clients, or on the other hand, the cultural knowledge that Aboriginal nurses and students have is completely disregarded by superiors and instructors.
Minore said both situations fail to acknowledge the reality that all nurses, regardless of cultural background, have individual skills and backgrounds that can complement a school or work environment.
While the study is being conducted out of Thunder Bay, it examines the situation province-wide. The research team has identified five health care facilities to represent a cross-section of the provincial health care situation. Included on the list is Sioux Lookout’s Meno Ya Win Health Centre, which will allow the researchers to gauge the situation in northern, remote First Nations.
Minore’s team will also examine the Treaty #3 context at the Kenora Aboriginal Health Access Centre; a large city hospital in Kingston that also serves fly-in communities along the James Bay and Hudson Bay coast; the North Bay General Hospital where there is a large percentage of Metis people; and the Six Nations health centre representing a southern First Nation setting with access to highly populated cities close by.
The researchers will also conduct interviews at all Ontario nursing schools, with a special emphasis on schools that have had success attracting Aboriginal students.
Minore said it was important to define a study that took the entire province into account.
“The province functions on a system-wide basis, as opposed to regional, in terms of policy formulation,” he said. “If you provide comprehensive views of the situation it will make a more compelling case to create strategies that are going to support change in the education sector and the clinical sector.”
The study will be completed in March 2013, at which point recommendations will go to the Ontario government.
Before that happens Minore said his team will take the recommendations to the communities and decision makers to ensure that the study has correctly interpreted what was told to the researchers.