Janet Gordon, Director of Health Services

Janet Gordon has been working in community health care for almost 30 years.

The Kasabonika First Nation band member and Director of Health Services for the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority first became interested in health care as a child following her mother, the community health representative, around the community while she cared for those who needed help.

“We didn’t have a nurse who lived in our community,” Gordon says. “So my mother was the primary health care provider in the community.”

Gordon used to deliver messages for her mother and also volunteered to interpret for and help the visiting nurses, doctors and dentists.

“That’s how I became interested,” she says. “Why didn’t we have a nurse in our community, and why couldn’t I be that nurse.”

That idea stuck in her head as she grew up, and her parents both supported her when she decided to leave the community to pursue that goal through high school and college.

Gordon graduated from the Confederation College Nursing Program in 1980 and went to work at the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital as a staff nurse before returning to her community to work as a community health nurse and eventually as the nurse in charge. She then took a supervisory position with the Sioux Lookout Zone Hospital in the late 1980’s and eventually took on an assistant executive position with the Sioux Lookout First Nations Health Authority in 1992. While still with SLFNHA, Gordon acted as the Zone Director for about five years during the 1990’s through an interchange program.

While Gordon has seen many changes in the health care system over the past 28 years, she is concerned that health statistics have deteriorated for many First Nation communities due to diabetes, mental illness and heart disease and envisions a health care system that would help alleviate those issues.

“I see a health care system that really addresses the needs of the communities, that would have First Nations people working as nurses, doctors and dentists,” Gordon says.

To get there, Gordon would like to see First Nation communities promoting healthy lifestyles and encouraging youth to finish high school and continue on to pursue post-secondary educations. Over the years, Gordon has pursued goals which she thought were unachievable for a woman and a First Nations person, but she succeeded through determination.

“We have seen our our children succeed in school,” Gordon says. “Everyone’s goal from the communities should be to have every youth finishing high school and continuing on to get a degree. And we want those educated young people to come back.”