Daily Herald Contributor
Healthcare experts, advocates, and workers gathered in Prince Albert this week for the Know Your Status 2024 Conference with the theme “Harm Reduction is Love”.
The conference was put together by the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority (NITHA) and ran from Oct. 16-17. It covered important areas like strategies to ending stigma, importance of traditional medicine, peer-engagement and training projects, current research along with STBBI updates and sharing the successes of current harm reduction programs in the province.
“This conference is to bring together like minded people that are wanting to make positive impact on peoples health especially with regards to HIV, Hepatitis C and other Sexually Transmitted and Blood Borne Infections(STBBIs),” Tara Campbell the Executive Director of NITHA said. “We see a disproportionate amount of Indigenous people either with HIV, Hep C or any other STBBI. We see a lot of it in our population and we can say its increasing.”
The conference is centred around ending stigma and harm reduction, and how best to do both. NITHA Public Health Manager Grace Akinjobi said it’s important to remind people that culture and tradition are very important to carrying out harm reduction programs.
“We want these programs to be carried out in culturally appropriate ways, focusing on Indigenous ways of doing things and meeting the Indigenous people at where they are at,” she said.
The organization also used this opportunity to celebrate the successes they have recorded.
“A lot of programs are happening across the province, among our peers,” Akinjobi said. “We want them to come out and celebrate those successes so that others would be encouraged. (It’s) people coming together to share their stories and even their challenges and learning from each other.”
One of the resource persons stated that the conference provides an opportunity for stakeholders to come in and discuss key issues around HIV and in the STBBI world.
“The purpose of the conference is to provide an opportunity for education as well as awareness on HIV and other sexually transmitted infections,” said Dr. Nnamdi Ndubuka, NITHA’s Medical Health Officer. “When we look at the data that we have as at the end of 2022, we had 20 new cases, a nine percent increase over the year before and a rate of 52 cases/100,000 people showing two to three times the Saskatchewan rate which suggests that there is an increase in the number of cases among the Indigenous population in the North, hence the theme ‘Harm Reduction is Love’.
He also added that they hope to achieve an increase in awareness of the increase in HIV and other sexually transmitted infections by the end of the conference.
“(We’re) also hoping that attendees at the conference will take away messages around what they can do reduce stigma and also embrace harm reduction as tool to support individuals who are challenged or struggling with other things that create harms by showing empathy and love,” he said.
The attendance was over 200 and consisted of persons from the Saskatchewan Health Authority, post-secondary institutions, and other stakeholders.
