Nunavut partners pledge action on suicide prevention

This graph, from a 2015 evaluation of the Nunavut Suicide Prevention Strategy, shows the comparative rates of death by suicide among the Qikiqtani, Kivalliq and Kitikmeot regions between 1984 and 2014. It shows that in most years, the worst death toll has occurred in Qikiqtani and the lowest in the Kitikmeot region.

In the wake of a highly set of recommendations from a special coroner’s inquest on Nunavut suicide last fall, the four groups behind the Nunavut Suicide Prevention Strategy promised Jan. 8 that they’ll work together to keep the strategy going and to renew it.

“We are pleased to welcome a new era in suicide prevention with our partners and look forward to strengthened and renewed partnership and collaboration moving forward,” Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. vice president James Eetoolook said in a joint news release from NTI, the Government of Nunavut, the RCMP and the Isaksimagit Inuusirmi Katujjiqatigiit Embrace Life Council.

That includes more meetings on creating an action plan that takes into account the coroner’s inquest recommendations, said the release.

The four parties put out the first version of their suicide prevention strategy and action plan in 2011.

This was set to expire in March 2014, but the four groups agreed to extend the strategy for at least one more year and also agreed to evaluate it in 2015.

The 2011 suicide prevention strategy and its attached action plan set out a list of activities that each party was supposed to do, with deadlines stating when these are supposed to be done.

Most of those actions were the responsibility of the GN.

But at a special coroner’s inquest held this past September, witnesses said the GN did not fund any of its suicide prevention action plan commitments.

That meant the suicide prevention strategy had no budget.

At the same time, the 2015 evaluation of the suicide prevention strategy was tabled as evidence at the coroner’s inquiry, with 42 recommendations for improving its implementation.

But a GN witness at the inquiry could not say how the government would respond to those recommendations.

Paul Okalik, the Nunavut health minister and the cabinet minister responsible for suicide prevention, says the GN will do better in the future.

“With the joint adoption today of the Nunavut Suicide Prevention Strategy, we carry on the tradition of working together for a common cause. All of us, as organizations and individuals, will contribute to making suicide a thing of our past,” Okalik said in the Jan. 8 release.

And last November, Premier Peter Taptuna announced that Karen Kabloona will serve as associate deputy minister of quality of life within the Department of Health.

Kabloona’s job will be to oversee implementation of the territory’s suicide prevention strategy.