Program brings x-ray workers to all Nunavut communities

SARA MINOGUE

It looks like a social club, but it’s actually a classroom set up at the small bar behind the Frobisher Inn dining room in Iqaluit.

Twelve students are sipping coffee in chairs or milling around one of two low wooden benches covered with a thin mattress and a clean sheet.

On the final day of an x-ray worker training course, it’s the last chance for the students to perfect their x-ray taking skills – positioning limbs, reading charts, and operating the x-ray machines positioned over the beds like giant overhead projectors.

Last Thursday, 12 students from around Nunavut got their basic radiography worker certificates. That’s good news for the communities, where taking an x-ray is often the first thing to happen to patients who come in with broken limbs, swollen fists or chest complaints.

“These jobs up to now have improved the quality of x-rays taken in the health centre, but they also take the load off the nurses,” says Judy Watts, who looks after the community health centres for the Government of Nunavut.

To help nurses out, the course has taken people already working in the health centres – as janitors, housekeepers and clerk-interpreters – and given them the skills to take on some technical work, and develop their careers at home.

This is the third time the 14-month course has run in Nunavut. It consists of three parts – two classroom sessions in Iqaluit, and a session where the instructor travels to the students’ home communities for on-the-job training.

The program, which began in 1998, will run until there are two trained x-ray workers in every community.

Watts says she hopes to see some of the graduates go on to become x-ray technologists. In the future, she’d like to see similar programs train community health workers to become pharmacists’ assistants and to take care of medical equipment.

Watts’ department is also developing a two-year mental health worker course that will prepare people for “front line mental health work” – including social workers, drug and alcohol counselors (“wellness counselors” in the Baffin region), and people who work with prisoners or young offenders.

The Department of Justice is also working to develop the course.

The x-ray course comes from Mohawk College and McMaster University, both in Hamilton, Ont., and was paid for by three regional economic development bodies: the Kakivak Association, Kitikmeot Economic Development Commission and the Kivalliq Partners in Development.