A.N.A.C. In Partnership with Community Health Nurses Canada: Pre Conference Workshops

A.N.A.C In Partnership with Community Health Nurses
Canada: Pre Conference Workshops

Overview: Indigenous Nursing Leadership: Sharing Practices in Diabetes and knowledge translation.

The Aboriginal Nurses Association of Canada in collaboration with the Aboriginal Nurses Manitoba Inc., Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative, Manitoba Region, and the Diabetes Integration Project have formed a synergistic relationship that promotes excellence in scholarship and capacity building within nursing. This workshop will bring together four key stakeholders actively involved in delivering and supporting nurse’s working with Indigenous communities.

This workshop will bring together nurses, educators, and practitioners who will bring forth ideas on ways to translate and mobilize Indigenous knowledge systems within nursing practice. Through a variety of Indigenous nursing voices, the outcomes of this workshop will be to engage the audience in a knowledge exchange about current diabetes programs and an opportunity to engage with fellow Aboriginal nurses in the Manitoba region. The unique contribution that nurses bring to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit is an enhance understanding of the multiple complexities, that led to culturally safe nursing care. The audience will have an opportunity to become better informed and able to recognize ways in which their knowledge about Diabetes and Aboriginal Peoples can be translated back and have lasting impact on their own practice.

Session 1: Contemporary First Nation Health Issues

The current Canadian health care system is structured according to the six “P’s” of design, which include Policy, Payments, Partnerships, Programs, Providers and Patients. Historic legislation, insurance models and disease responsiveness continue to stagnate the First Nation health care experience and delivery model regardless of effect but with great effort. There is tremendous time, money and energy spent on ineffective partnerships and inter-jurisdictional power plays, archaic program design reflective a deficit or illness driven model, persistent deflections from the real issues and band-aide medicine focused on the physical body while the social, emotional and spiritual needs for wellness and balance continue to be neglected or not invested in.

This narrowly informed health assessment and policy interplay stalls improvement opportunities and deflects from the true source of the problem. So what is the true source of the problem and how do we respond to it? Just as physicians and nurses follow a standardized SOAP note to communicate and determine the patient’s medical problem in a structured format, this presentation explains the health of a nation using the same assessment and communication tool through a wholistic lens. All medicine people (western or traditional practitioners) know that you must use the right medicine to treat the source, not just the symptoms, of the wound otherwise you are just masking the pain or prolonging the suffering.   It is time to shift the conversation from “health care” to “healing” using Indigenous cultural and spiritual ways of knowing as the path to lead us there.

Presenter: Melanie MacKinnon, BN, Senior Director, First Nations, Metis and Inuit Health Section, College of Medicine, University of Manitoba

Session 2: The Diabetes Integration Project (DIP)

The Diabetes Integration Project (DIP) offers a unique and integrated approach to addressing the secondary complications found among First Nation people living with type 2 Diabetes in nineteen of sixty-four First Nation communities in Manitoba. The Diabetes Integration Project employs both western and First Nation’s approaches based on medical and nursing sciences supported and informed by First Nation values and sciences. DIP currently works within two health care delivery models at the community level, the nursing station and public health models. This model of care challenges both provider and client to consider deeper and more meaningful ways to learn to live well with diabetes. Actively seeking to understand the broad influence of oppression on the immediate and long-term health and healing challenges First Nation communities face on a daily basis, DIP’s approach chooses not to rely on a deficit focus. A deficit analysis approach mimics the power differential disparities First Nation face in settler Canada where poverty remains a socially constructed phenomenon. Our workshop will provide participants with information on who we are, how we were established as well as information on the DIP Model of Care.

Presenter: Caroline Chartrand, Executive Director, Diabetes Integration Project Inc.

Session 3: Community Health Nurses and Diabetes

The Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative team from the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, Manitoba Region, will be presenting on diabetes and its complications in Manitoba. The 3 hour session will cover most recent research work, current statistics on type 2 diabetes and children, and then focus the rest of the session on how do we move forward educating on healthy eating, and physical activity to prevent diabetes. Community Health Nurses will leave the session with information and tools for preventing type 2 diabetes and its complications. Prepare to learn through hand-on activities. Some time will be reserved for questions.

Presenter: Frances Desjarlais, Regional Diabetes Coordinator, First Nation & Inuit Health Branch, Manitoba Region
Natalie Wowk Slukynsky, RD, LC, ADI Nutritionist/School Health/Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds, First Nation & Inuit Health Branch, Manitoba Region
Elizabeth Proskurnik, Special Activity Specialist, First Nation & Inuit Health Branch, Manitoba Region