Indigenous youth want more Indigenous-led models, support to access health care in Winnipeg, report says

Some Indigenous youth in Winnipeg say discrimination in the province's primary health-care system is pervasive — and they want more Indigenous staff and fewer barriers to accessing care in order to help fix that problem, a new report says.

The project OurCare included a national survey completed in fall 2022 with more than 9,000 respondents. It's meant to examine the state of primary care — where individuals get ongoing care or treatment for minor issues, outside of emergency departments — in Canada. The research group MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, based at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, released its final report in February. 

As part of the project, it also held a roundtable in November with 26 Indigenous youth, aged 19 to 29, at the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre in Winnipeg.

Advocate Michael Redhead Champagne, who led the one-day discussion, said the youth explained how both they and their family members often get lower-quality care in the health-care system.

"They not only were worried about themselves, but they also were talking about how they have relatives that are in isolated rural or remote communities or in places where they don't have the same access that we would in Winnipeg to primary care infrastructure," he said in a Sunday interview.

The national report — Primary Care Needs OurCare: The final report of the largest pan-Canadian conversation about primary care — calls for changes in Manitoba's mainstream primary care system, and is part of a national initiative meant to engage Canadians about the future of primary care.

OurCare also released a local report following the November roundtable, titled Health services should care for us 'Auntie Style': A conversation about primary care with Indigenous Youth in Winnipeg.

The report highlighted key issues the youth expressed with the province's health-care system, including "anti-Indigenous discrimination," a "deep mistrust" of the system, lack of support for navigating the system and lack of health resources in First Nations communities.

For Champagne, the idea of kinship stood out for him during the discussion.

"It means being treated in the health-care system as if you're being treated like a family member or a relative, with love and care and respect," he said.

"When we were trying to ask the young people to focus on what type of a primary care system they would like to see, inevitably, time and time again, the conversations broadened out to 'I would like to see this for myself and this for my family.' There was no differentiation."

Youth and young parents said they have had difficulty finding family doctors and getting proper identification, like birth certificates or health cards, for their children. 

Indigenous-led spaces, walk-in clinics and medical practices can help them gain trust in the health-care system, the report adds.

Youth also called for the hiring of more Indigenous staff and the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in health-care delivery.