Sioux Lookout Zone Family Physicians

When I am not taking trips to my communities, I am in the hospital doing patient care or family clinics and also doing the day to day back-up and paper work required for the communities I look after - taking phone calls, receiving faxes, follow-up on lab work, doing the paper work generated by my community visits... then there is the committee work involved in working in a hospital and my role as an educator with nursing students, family practice and pediatric residents who rotate through the hospital...

- Dr Harriet Lennox

The Sioux Lookout Zone Family Physicians practice family medicine with the 20,000 Cree, Ojibway and Oji-Cree people who live in 25 remote fly-in communities dotted across Northwestern Ontario. 

Our work with our First Nations patients takes place at many levels. We provide first line medical services to patients in our designated communities which we visit about once a month. We work in the Meno Ya Win Health Centre in Sioux Lookout, providing inpatient care, doing emergency call and seeing patients in clinic (two half-day clinics per week).

We provide distance back up and advice to nurses in our designated communities. We do patient advocacy and support. And, as educators, we bring our unique medical experiences to others interested in learning about remote First Nations medicine. Our Health Centre has state-of-the-art video conferencing capacity for educational and clinical applications. We are also linked to many of the communities we serve via a telehealth network connecting remote sites to our hospital and major health care centres across Ontario.

An air ambulance service staffed by critical care flight paramedics is available 24/7 in the Sioux Lookout Zone. The Medical Air Transport Centre has a dedicated air ambulance located in Sioux Lookout as well as planes and/or helicopters in other near-by centres including Kenora and Thunder Bay. We make use of this service on a daily basis to transfer patients from a northern community to the hospital in Sioux Lookout or to a tertiary care centre, usually Winnipeg or Thunder Bay.