New boarding home coming for Kivalliq patients, Nunavut minister says

Health minister Pat Angnakak announced Mar. 15 that her government would begin work to bring a new medical boarding home to Rankin Inlet. (PHOTO BY STEVE DUCHARME)

Amid rapturous applause from Nunavut MLAs last Thursday, March 15, Health Minister Pat Angnakak announced that her government would begin work to bring a new medical boarding home to Rankin Inlet.

The boarding home will be the first dedicated facility of its kind in Nunavut’s Kivalliq region.

The official statement came a day after news of the new Kivalliq boarding home first broke during the assembly’s committee of the whole meeting, as MLAs looked over the Health Department’s 2018-19 capital budget.

According to Angnakak, the federal minister for Indigenous Services, Jane Philpott, gave the green light for the territory to issue a request for proposals, or RFP, for the project last month.

“We met with the minister in early February to tell her how urgently we needed to get a decision from her on whether or not this would be supported, and so we have just recently found out yesterday,” Angnakak said during the March 14 committee of the whole meeting.

Discussion on the project has been ongoing for the last two years, she said, and “the credit belongs to [former health ministers] Paul Okalik and also to [George] Hickes here who worked hard on that file.”

In her statement the following day, Angnakak committed to holding consultations with Nunavummiut on what services the boarding home should provide, prior to issuing the RFP to developers.

Currently, many Kivalliq medical patients are forced to travel to Winnipeg for extended treatment and stay at the Kivalliq Inuit Centre, which has been the subject of numerous complaints in the last few years, ranging from lack of cleanliness to bed bugs.

In her first days appearing before the legislature as Nunavut’s health minister, with one of cabinet’s most challenging portfolios, Angnakak was the target of a barrage of complaints by MLAs.

Among those complaints was concern over the inadequate levels of security and cleanliness at the Tammattaavik medical boarding home in Iqaluit, which serves medical patients across Nunavut’s Qikiqtani region.

Uqqummiut MLA Pauloose Keyootak revisited the subject during question period on March 12.

Keyootak told Angnakak that he personally witnessed intoxicated individuals harassing elders at the boarding home, with no sign of security guards.

“It became evident that something unpleasant was occurring; especially the disabled people and the elders tend to get scared,” Keyootak said.

“There are people who were coming in and out [of the boarding home] intoxicated and were bothering the patients who are ill.”

Angnakak responded that the facility is under contract to provide 24-hour security, seven days a week, for patients staying at Tammattaavik, but could not explain why a guard was not present during the incident described by Keyootak.

“I don’t know why there was no security guard,” she said, adding “I will look into it.”