Christine Tootoo had to spend weeks in a hotel, far from home, while she awaited the arrival of her second baby. Tootoo lives in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, and since there isn’t a birthing centre close by, she had to fly to Winnipeg ahead of her due date earlier this year (a distance of approximately 1480 kms).
One early morning in her hotel room, her contractions came fast and irregular. By the time her partner, Rico Manitok, went to warm up the car, everything changed.
Manitok called 911 at 4:12 a.m. Two minutes later, their daughter was born on the floor of a Winnipeg hotel room.
Across many northern and remote Indigenous communities, families must leave weeks before giving birth to get the medical care they need. Some travel alone, others bring a support person, while children and extended family stay behind.
What the hell do you do, build and staff hospitals in every backwater of the second largest country in the world? How do you staff it? We’re an hour and a bit out of a city of 1M and we still have to get doctors to travel from the city to run the clinics and there’s no birthing clinic because of it.
You staff it by making it easier for the local kids who are interested to get medical training. In remote areas, they’re the most likely to come back and stay. They don’t all have to be doctors, either. Midwives help. Nursing stations help.
And then when they’re trained, they stay in the cities because that’s where the money is, and the creature comforts.
I think you would be surprised. Look at the (admittedly short, since it’s a young institution) track record of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine and where its graduates end up, for instance. Not every one of them becomes a GP serving in a rural or remote community, but a good percentage graduate with the intention of making that their career. I can’t see why similar efforts elsewhere wouldn’t work.