Again, MP Idlout, I have spent a significant amount of time with our elders and medicine people, learning our own medicines and traditional medicine practice alongside my western medical journey. During medical school breaks, I would go home and spend the summers with elders. During weekends, I would go home and learn from them.
There are very few indigenous physicians who do this. There are a handful of us who do that. As part of our regular practice, we routinely refer to healers and medicine people and elders within our own community, because we know the network that exists there, and they trust us.
This is an important part of our health system, and, unfortunately, this is not compensated. What I do as a physician and what I've done in the past is that, working fee-for-service, I would do a home visit with an elder and the patient. I would bill the provincial health system for a home visit fee, and I would split that fee fifty-fifty, so that the elder or traditional medicine person was compensated equitably to what I was compensated. I did that myself.
This is not something that's sustainable. Most health professionals—most doctors, most nurses—would not donate 50% of their salary to someone. That's what we really need to talk about: how we are going to adequately compensate our medicine people and elders who are identified by our own people and who we use in the community. It's a very important part of our health system.
Yes, I do that. It's not compensated. It needs to be compensated. There needs to be more of that.
If we look at the Diné College in the Navajo Nation, they have a training system for indigenous traditional medicine people and for Navajo students to learn from their own elders within their communities. We need to have processes for doing that in this country, whether that's indigenous medical students, indigenous medical schools, where we're training alongside our elders and traditional medicine people and providing care in a culturally safe, appropriate way that is as equal and as valid as western medicine.