Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence (PWHCE)

First Nations and Inuit women and infants face challenging health issues in their communities where there are environmental risks. Literature examining these contexts and the processes through which health is affected is relatively limited. The objective of this review is to examine and consolidate the available literature on environmental threats to First Nations and Inuit maternal health in order to identify priorities for future research.

This document reports on the "Leaders for Tomorrow: Rural Women Creating Change" workshop held Saturday February 7, and Sunday February 8, 2009 in Davidson, Saskatchewan.

The workshop was part of the Rural Women's Issues Committee of Saskatchewan's project, "Empowering Rural Women's Voices".

This project began in 2005, with support from Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence and Status of Women Canada.

The study findings are descriptions of women's experiences and concerns about the social and health service programs that directly influence their health and their economic and social well-being. Themes addressed in this study include access to health and social services, housing, childcare, food security, education, and the value of resource centre service providers and programs in the lives of low-income women in both rural and urban communities. This report highlights the central role of Family Resource Centres for low-income women and their families and the need to strengthen and support related programs.

This report states that there has been little investigation into the connections between family violence, immigration, and homelessness of women. Abused immigrant women and Canadian-born women face similar barriers to independent living; however, the migration process can present additional challenges for immigrant women. For abused immigrant women, homelessness is often cyclical and compounded by a range of factors; ability to speak English , knowledge of Canadian systems, cultural background, and family structure all profoundly affect the immigrant woman’s experience of the pathways into and out of homelessness. In order to prevent homelessness and to plan programs and policies for populations, theoretical models that address key solutions and acknowledge critical temporal factors are required.

The report was prepared for the National Secretariat on Homelessness and eceived funding from the National Research Program of the National Homelessness Initiative and the Prairie Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Integration (PCERII).

This report summarizes a Gathering of First Nations and Métis women which took place on November 29, 2005 in Thompson Manitoba. The women came from ten northern communities throughout Manitoba. This group was brought together with the goal of identifying key health issues and potential research questions and methodologies to facilitate a growth in knowledge, where there is too often a dearth – Northern Manitoba.

This report is a 10 year retrospective of the work of the Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence.  Fertile Ground, Healthy Harvest builds on the 5 year retrospective, Seeds of Change, celebrating successes and accomplishments and outlining plans for the years ahead.

Federal and provincial farm women's support has been eroding in recent years. Until this research, there had been no systematic examination of this support and its erosion. In this Participatory Action Research (PAR), initiated by the Saskatchewan Women's Agricultural Network (SWAN), the researchers explored five major components related to the erosion of farm women's support programs in Saskatchewan:

Aboriginal groups have unique cultures with different languages and traditions that influence self-identify, and should not be thought of as a homogeneous group. Furthermore, this confusion of terms has particular implications in the realm of health care, because terminology, identity and legal status have direct bearing on who receives what health benefits. More often than not, when
looking at health services, it is more suitable to recognize the differences between First Nations, Métis and Inuit women.
This paper was written for both health researchers and policy-makers to examine the legal entitlements for health care services, clarify the terminology, and most importantly to demonstrate how they affect the women seeking health services. This understanding can then be taken into account in new research and policy development. In keeping with Prairie Women’s Health Centre
of Excellence’s mandate, specific to Manitoba and Saskatchewan, this paper is focused in those two provinces. The discussion in this paper focuses on First Nations and Métis people, who comprise the vast majority of Aboriginal people in the two provinces.

The Northwest Métis Women’s Health Research Project investigated the health care
needs of elderly women and their caregivers in the Métis community of Buffalo
Narrows, Saskatchewan. The research project looked at access to home care and longterm
care services for elderly women in the particular demographic, social, cultural and
economic context of northern Métis communities. The goal of the project was to
recommend appropriate home care and long term care policies for northern Métis
communities and to ensure that these policies will be responsive to women’s needs as
care recipients, care providers and caregivers. By looking at the specific needs of
women, the research project hoped to raise awareness of gender as an important factor to
consider in developing and implementing policies related to care of the elderly.

The past two decades have seen an incrementally steady development in maternal and
infant health programming targeted to Aboriginal communities. This paper reviewed
existing maternal and infant health programs and guidelines as administered under
the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch. While the aim here is help assess the extent
to which populations may be under-served or un-served by current Aboriginal
maternal and infant programming, it is by no means intended to discredit the efforts
of FNIHB, but simply to highlight where further spending could lead to better health
outcomes for a greater number of people.