Diabetes Awareness Month reveals 1 in 3 are affected

Diabetes Awareness Month reveals 1 in 3 affected 17 per cent of Indigenous Canadians who live on-reserve are affected by diabetes. The Misiway Community Health Centre is strives to help.

Officials with the Misiway Community Health Centre in Timmins indicated over 17 per cent of Canada's Indigenous people who live on-reserve have diabetes and close to 13 per cent who live off-reserve do.

“So there is a big link to you know residential schooling systems, colonization and the high prevalence of diabetes in the indigenous communities," said Christie Lackie, a registered nurse and certified diabetes educator with the centre.

In an effort to help its clients, Misiway has a team in place to offer a Diabetes Education Program. It includes Lackie and a registered dietician. They said the addition of a pharmacist to the team, makes it unique.

“He can provide medication reviews for clients, he can do a lot of education for different medications as well. If people have questions or hesitancies or if we want to change things up," added Lackie.

With November being Diabetes Awareness Month, officials with Diabetes Canada said one in three people live with the disease.

Last month, a Framework for Diabetes in Canada was launched and those involved are calling on governments to fund and implement it.

“By having a framework, a collective roadmap-so if you’re in Manitoba, or if you’re in PEI-what are we doing to think about the best practices that this framework starts to lay out," said Laura Syron, president and chief executive officer for Diabetes Canada.

And she is asking health care workers to share their best practices with other provinces.

"It also allows us to start as a country, collecting data about diabetes because certainly what gets measured gets done," added Syron.

Hillary Debye, the dietician at Misiway Community Health Centre said one of its best practices is to offer culturally-focused services.

“For some that means integrating foraged foods or hunted foods, country foods into our cooking classes," said Debye.

"We like to use things like moose meat, bear meat. We’ve used fiddleheads, blueberries, saskatoon berries as a way to connect people back with their culture, to connect back to the land.”

Diabetes Canada reported nearly twelve million people are affected and the number of cases is predicted to increase by 27 per cent within the next decade. It said it costs the health care system $50 million dollars a day to treat people.