Keewatin hamlets can’t run own programs

Even if they want to, Keewatin hamlets can’t go it alone in providing health care to community residents.

That’s what Health Minister Kelvin Ng said last week in response to questions from Kivallivik MLA Kevin O’Brien, who represents two of three Keewatin hamlets who want to run their own dental therapy programs.

Recently, the hamlets of Baker Lake, Arviat and Rankin Inlet have written to the Keewatin Regional Health Board and to the GNWT, saying they want no part of a new health board plan to fire the region’s dental therapists and replace them with dentists working for a private company called Kiguti Dental Services.

Arviat and Baker Lake are in O’Brien’s Kivallivik consituency.

“Most of these individuals, these therapists, have worked for the past ten to 12 years in the school system with the children,” O’Brien told Ng last week. “The parents and the teaching staff are very happy with them. They would like to see the system stay as it is.”

But Ng said he supports the health board’s decision to turn Keewatin dental services over to a private company.

“The board, I believe, has made a sound decision,” Ng said.

Health board equals community empowerment?

And Ng said the three Keewatin hamlets are wrong in saying that their desire to run their own health programs is in line with the GNWT’s community empowerment policy.

“We fund the Keewatin Regional Health Board as it stands now, that is empowerment,” Ng said on Thursday.

But O’Brien warned Ng that the GNWT could be setting itself up for a repeat of the recent Rankin Inlet tank farm fiasco.

After a $100,000 government study initiated after numerous complaints from O’Brien and other Keewatin leaders, the GNWT’s own plans to reorganize fuel distribution in the region turned out to be more expensive than other options.

“Mr. Speaker, once again the people want to be heard,” O’Brien said. “They do not agree with this new proposal. In the end, Mr. Speaker, we do not want to see another David and Goliath story.”

Another controversy for Tapiriit?

Tapiriit, a private Rankin Inlet “development corporation” that nearly won a lucrative GNWT contract to build a $6 million tank farm in Rankin, is also a major player in the Keewatin health board’s new dental plan.

Tapiriit owns 49 per cent of Kiguti Dental Services, the company that’s been contracted by the health board to replace dental therapists in the Keewatin after July 1.

On Friday, after more questions from O’Brien, Ng insisted that communities cannot break away form the Keewatin health board in order to manage their own health care funding.

“[Y]ou could not do it on a community by community basis, Mr. Speaker,” Ng said. “So, no, I am not supportive of block funding individual communities for health and social services programs at this time.”

Communities enraged by deal

Approved at an October 1996, Keewatin health board meeting, the deal with Kiguti Dental Services was announced in a May 8 health board press release.

Under it, dental therapists who have working within Keewatin schools will be fired.

After July 1, the work they used to do will be performed by dentists working for Kiguti. The health board says the fired dental therapists will be offered other jobs.

But after hearing about the new arrangment, the hamlet of Baker Lake passed a motion instructing its lawyer to find ways of separating from the health board.

Two other hamlet councils ­ in Arviat and Rankin Inlet ­ have also rejected the plan and are seeking to run their own dental therapy programs separately from the regional health board.