Montreal doctor’s new book confronts anti-Indigenous racism in health care – Nunatsiaq News

Dr. Samir Shaheen-Hussain often tells the story of the young Inuk boy who arrived in the emergency room of the Montreal Children’s Hospital in 2017.

The boy had fallen off an ATV in his Nunavik community, sustaining injuries to his head and abdomen, and was flown south via Quebec’s air ambulance — alone.

Shaheen-Hussain treated the boy, who he said cried inconsolably. And there was little he or his colleagues could do; the boy only spoke Inuktitut.

Little did he know at the time that the little boy would be a catalyst for change to Quebec’s policy of flying children — many of them from Nunavik and neighbouring Eeyou Istchee — aboard its ambulance service without the company or support of a parent or caregiver.

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