Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council

It started in 2018, when Chief Isadore Day and I met while he was still the Health Minister for the Assembly of First Nations. And we began talking about Boehringer Ingelheim, our approach to serving humankind. And, he was quite intrigued with the approach we take in engaging in respectful relationships. We wanted to have the Indigenous community inform Boehringer Ingelheim in our collaborations with Indigenous communities. And we found a common purpose, and that's how we started down this journey.

We were approached by Boehringer Ingelheim, Canada, to run this virtual diabetes care pilot project. So we applied for a small grant and were successful. And so far, we've been using the funds to help facilitate travel to these more remote communities and also to purchase A1C testing devices, including the A1CNow and DCA analyzer cassettes.

We're the ones that have to look after our citizens. We're the ones that know what is needed, and that's why we really need to fight for jurisdiction over health in our own communities. Many of our communities are remote, fly in, boat, logging roads, and the distances between the nations are sometimes a lot. So making sure that our people have access to healthcare, makes it very difficult to do that.

I had a really hard time when I become a diabetic. When I was a young fellow in my teens, I had operations on my pancreas and my stomach, and doctors told my parents and me that I might becoming a diabetic, because I wouldn't be able to use enough of my own insulin. So they told me to just be careful. I wasn't being careful. I became a type 2 diabetic.

People want to be able to get healthcare and be respected, and so if they feel they're not being listened to, respected by their doctor, they don't go. Or if they go to the hospital, and they're waiting for hours to be heard, and they don't go. We really need better access to health. Our health system as it is does not serve our people very well. So, I think those are some of the highlights of the issues that we face, although there's so many more.

The challenge within the Nuu-chah-nulth area is that you have 14 communities that span a diverse area, and the dietician has to take all sorts of transportation modes to be able to reach the different communities, from float planes to ferries to a car, and does not have the ability to spend enough time with each patient to optimize their care, to be able to understand what the patient's needs are.

Our vision for diabetes support in all the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations is offering every person living with diabetes who would like to access to an endocrinologist or diabetes specialty services. So this includes myself, so being able to visit these communities that I wouldn't regularly get to go to that are more challenging to get to.

The Nuu-chah-nulth project brings together technology and a dietician who is within the Nuu-chah-nulth community to optimize care for the patient.

I find that empowering community members with the knowledge on how to adjust their own insulin has made such a big difference in their overall blood sugar management. Just by having that little bit of knowledge, their overall management of their diabetes has changed drastically.

With diabetes, I had a really, really hard, rough time. I remember that one time I couldn't do my artwork or do any work anymore. I'm really happy I got involved. Being on this different programs that the nutritionist and the nurse got me on, I've been doing really good, and I used to have a hard time just walking not even half a block, but now I can walk for miles.