There are a couple of things. I work in the first nations and Inuit health branch. We have regional offices, and each one of those has one or more physicians. There are now a number of first nations health authorities. Each one of those has a physician or physicians attached to it.
As you can imagine, the kinds of difficulties that we've heard about are, if anything, magnified in the first nations context. We're not always a competitive employer. We can't pay as much as wealthier jurisdictions. The conditions are extremely difficult. So in many cases the branch and the regional offices resort to innovative practices such as they can.
Because provinces are really responsible for the provision of primary care, when it comes to primary care we make arrangements, for example, in Manitoba with the northern medical unit of the University of Manitoba to supply the doctors. Because it's not practical to say each community or even each large grouping of communities will have a full-time doctor, we have a whole roster of physicians who will spend a certain amount of time in a certain community. They're associated with universities, or they have their own practices, so it's done on a part-time basis. We're realists: we know we won't be able to attract full-time physicians for most of these places.
On the training and development side, we're quite excited about the recent developments in adapting the curriculum for medical students to give them sensitivity to an awareness of aboriginal needs--cultural competency is what we like to call it--and all of the 17 medical schools in Canada have agreed to adopt this new curriculum and adapt it and work it into their own.
Over time we see that is more welcoming, not only to the many aboriginal students who are picking up medical studies, but also to the non-aboriginal practitioners. And the reality is that aboriginal people will be served in large measure by non-aboriginal practitioners, particularly in urban settings. So we're trying to enhance and increase the number of people who have that kind of cultural competency, if you will, an ability to medically treat patients in the way they would like to be treated. So we think this will make a big difference over time.
The other thing is, of course, often as people get exposed to this, they become very interested in it, so part of it is really awareness-building.