Thank you.
Indigenous peoples in Canada experience unacceptable disparities in health outcomes, and there continues to be a large, unmet need for culturally safe medical care to address this gap. With this goal in mind and guided by TRC call to action number 22, we established Lu'ma Medical Centre in 2016, an indigenous-operated not-for-profit society. Our centre delivers safe, culturally integrated primary care to 1,900 indigenous people in urban Vancouver through a team-based, two-eyed-seeing model, blending western and traditional indigenous approaches to health and healing.
We have been fortunate to build excellent partnerships with the First Nations Health Authority, Vancouver Coastal Health and our provincial Ministry of Health, in developing our community-guided service plan that funds our interdisciplinary team. The support from our local MP, Don Davies, and our provincial MLA and provincial health minister, Adrian Dix, has been invaluable.
However, we stand in a difficult position. We are facing unprecedented demand for our primary care services, fuelled by the overlapping health emergencies of the COVID-19 pandemic, opiate overdose epidemic and indigenous-specific racism in health care. We have run out of physical space in our building to meet the needs of our growing patient panel and seek financial support to make the necessary capital improvements to an adjacent unit in our building to expand our services.
With this planned expansion, we plan to build two additional medical exam rooms, a physiotherapy gym, a sacred space for group healing and ceremony, a traditional medicines room, a culturally integrated pharmacy and three counselling rooms. These improvements will allow us to fully expand to the full realization of our service plan, attaching 2,800 first nations away from home and urban indigenous people to culturally safe primary care.
We have fundraised $60,000 through local and provincial partners but need an additional $160,000 to complete this capital project. It is exceedingly difficult for indigenous health organizations such as ours to access capital funding to develop needed projects like this off reserve, where the majority of indigenous people—status, non-status and Métis—live.
We call for a partnership between Indigenous Services Canada and the Department of Health to develop a funding stream for capital grants to support the development of indigenous-specific health centres off reserve. This mechanism could provide enormous benefits for status first nations and other indigenous people living in urban centres away from their home communities and help the federal government meet its commitment to closing the health gap between indigenous and non-indigenous people in this country.
I'd like to highlight how we have responded to local care needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are currently the sole indigenous-specific COVID-19 vaccination site in the city of Vancouver, providing cultural support services through the full vaccination experience. Of the 10 mass vaccination clinics completed or scheduled, seven have had bookings handled under the provincial booking system. At these clinics, only 1% to 29% of attendees were indigenous, as non-indigenous people were still able to book appointments and displaced our community members, who sought the familiar safe environment of our centre for their vaccinations. In the subsequent three pilot clinics where the bookings have been coordinated directly by our organization, 99% of vaccines have gone directly to indigenous community members.
We see this as a major success in overcoming vaccine hesitancy and improving immunity in our urban indigenous population, which faces higher rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death compared to non-indigenous Canadians.
We advocate for Health Canada and Indigenous Services Canada to build more direct partnerships with urban indigenous organizations such as ours, which have earned the trust of our local communities, for the safe and effective delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to indigenous people off reserve. We believe this approach will lead to higher vaccination rates and improved health outcomes compared with the current reliance on provincial or territorial partners for all off-reserve vaccinations for indigenous peoples.
Thank you very much for your time and opportunity to share the story of the Lu'ma Medical Centre in this forum.
Hay'qa o'siem. Chi miigwetch. All my relations.