NTI Board Unanimously Support Three Pillars in Addictions and Trauma Treatment System for Nunavut

(February 14, 2019 – Iqaluit, Nunavut) The Nunavut Tunngavik Board of Directors supports the three pillar approach to Addictions and Trauma Treatment system in Nunavut and calls on government to fund the system on an urgent basis.

Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI) has been an active partner of the multi-party feasibility process in 2017 and 2018 for a new addiction and trauma treatment system in Nunavut. The study identifies three pillars for treatment: to enhance community based services through on the land healing camps in each of the three regions, beginning in April 2019; to construct a 32- bed Nunavut Recovery Centre in Iqaluit which can meet the needs of pregnant women and their families, opening in 2023/24; and to develop an Inuit workforce through an Inuit counsellor training program and a laddered Bachelor of Social Work program, to run concurrently, which would enable treatment in Inuktut.

Call to Action 21 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on, “the federal government to provide sustainable funding for existing and new Aboriginal healing centres to address the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual harms caused by residential schools, and to ensure that the funding of healing centres in Nunavut” is a priority.

“Inuit have carried burdens for long enough,” said President Kotierk. “We need many different types of healing, across the territory, in our own language and with our families. The system improvements will be based in Inuit culture and ways of being through the development of a made-in-Nunavut program and Inuit workforce. As a demonstration of our commitment, we are allocating $5 million of Inuit specific health funding towards the system improvements and we will work with the territorial Department of Health on an Inuit workforce development plan.”

President Kotierk concluded, “Our partnership has resulted in a robust plan that will see healing in our language and our ways.”

The First Nations and Inuit Health Branch of Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), invested in the feasibility study in February 2017. A trilateral partnership between NTI, the Government of Nunavut (GN) and ISC finalized the feasibility study in August 2018.

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For further information:

Franco Buscemi
Interim-Director of Communications
Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated
fbuscemi@tunngavik.com

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