Good morning. I'm Carol Hopkins, executive director of the Thunderbird Partnership Foundation. Our mandate is to implement the mental wellness continuum framework and the “Honouring our Strengths” renewal framework. Our focus is on mental wellness, meaning addictions and mental health.
I want to also begin by acknowledging the invitation and saying thank you for that and for sharing time with the Assembly of First Nations. I also want to recognize the Algonquin people on whose land we are meeting today.
I'd like to start by taking us back to 2004, when the third report from the Auditor General criticized the first nations and Inuit health branch of Health Canada for the third time for not doing enough to mitigate the issues related to prescription drug abuse in first nations and Inuit communities. First Nations and Inuit Health then established a drug utilization prevention and promotion working group.
That working group had a mandate to do three things. One was to make data more available from the non-insured health benefits. The second was to engage first nations communities in developing and implementing a community-driven response to prescription drug abuse. The third one was to work with prescribers to address practices and situations of over-prescribing.
That was in 2004. It's 12 years later and one of those issues is still outstanding, that is, the pilot- and proposal-driven nature of funding to first nations communities to address prescription drug use issues. The most critical issue when we talk about the opiate crisis amongst first nations people is that there is annual funding based on proposals, and those proposals are not always fulfilled. It's year-to-year funding somehow expecting that within a year we're going to be able to take care of the opiate crisis that exists in first nations communities.
Addressing the opiate crisis has been a challenge, then, most significantly because of the inconsistent support to community-governed and culturally based treatment. One community-based opioid misuse study reported that among adults ages 20 to 30 years old, 28% of the community was engaged in a buprenorphine/naloxone program. Now, 28% of the community is double the rate of diabetes in that same community. We have dedicated funding, thankfully, to address the issues related to diabetes in our communities, but we don't have the same type of resources when it comes to dealing with the opiate crisis.
The drug utilization prevention and promotion program was successful in demonstrating and piloting a number of community-based programs. We also have a Lakehead study that demonstrated the success of community-governed programs to address opiate addictions. We have other programs in northern Ontario that you'll hear more about and that also demonstrate the importance and significance of this success, unfounded in urban environments and other communities, simply because of the team-based, community-driven, culturally based programs that are offered. Yet they do not have annually committed core funding within their health envelopes.