https://www.infirmiere-canadienne.com/blogs/ic-contenu/2025/04/07/infirmiere-premieres-nations-michelle-buffalo
Michelle Buffalo’s patients ‘feel secure’ with her Indigenous background and specialized skills
By Laura Eggertson
April 7, 2025
Courtesy of Michelle Buffalo
Good nursing practice isn’t always about telling patients a certain way to do things, Michelle Buffalo says. It’s also about listening. “It’s about letting your clients be comfortable enough to voice to you what they use as their traditional health and wellness practices.”
Indigenous communities hold Michelle Buffalo’s heart.
The registered nurse, who is a member of Alberta’s Samson Cree Nation, has worked in urban and rural communities in large hospitals and small nursing stations. She enjoys interacting with patients from a variety of backgrounds, journeys and cultures.
But she always returns to the communities that need her skills the most, like Fort Chipewyan, a remote fly-in community in Alberta of about 1,000 Cree, Dene and Métis people on the western tip of Lake Athabasca.
There, where Buffalo works for Nunee Health Board Society's Health Clinic-Nursing Station in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, as a treatment RN and covering nurse-in-charge, she provides culturally appropriate care and hopes one day to practise within her full scope as a nurse specialized in wound, ostomy and continence.
That scope includes certification from the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Institute in Gatineau, Quebec, which she received in 2021, 11 years after graduating with her bachelor of science in nursing from the Grande Prairie Regional College, now known as Northwestern Polytechnic, in Alberta.
Buffalo decided to specialize in wound, ostomy and continence care because she is acutely aware of the elevated levels of diabetes among Indigenous people, which often results in their need for specialized wound and preventive care. The high sugar levels characteristic of diabetes, for example, impairs the ability of wounds to heal.
“My skill set comes in handy up there,” Buffalo says of Fort Chip, as the community is commonly known.
She works two-week rotations at the nursing station there before flying back to her two daughters, her father, her garden, and her painting supplies at her home in Wetaskiwin, south of Edmonton.
Collaborates with home care
“I’m able to collaborate with the home care team, and I do a lot of the wound care when they consult me,” she adds.
“We all work together because it’s such a small community, and you’re ‘it’ up there.”
Patients currently experiencing lower limb issues like swelling, nerve pain or vascular impairment fly out of the community to Fort McMurray or Edmonton for important exams and diagnostics to help guide their treatment plan.
Because of Buffalo’s specialized skills, however, and her ability to screen patients during regular clinics, she can focus on prevention and enable many of those she sees to start preventive practices earlier.
The fact that Buffalo is Indigenous and speaks some Cree also forges a connection with her patients that is often unspoken, she says.
“Just being an Indigenous nurse [means] they feel secure.”
After doing basic lower leg assessments with her patients, Buffalo encourages them to check their feet daily, to note any changes, and to follow up with their doctor if they see anything different. She also marries her knowledge of traditional medicines that promote healing with her nursing knowledge, Buffalo says.
Her patients also teach her.
One elder, she remembers, grew tired of the time it was taking to heal the irritation, redness and pain around the site of her stoma, the opening in her stomach that connected to the elder’s ostomy pouch.
Although Buffalo had provided wound care and given the elder wound powder and coached her in how to use it, it wasn’t working quickly. The elder opted to brew a traditional medicinal tea, which she cooled and used around her stoma.
Traditional medicine heals
It healed the wound.
“We tried everything western medicine has taught us, and it does work — but to see it heal it even faster with her traditional medicine, that was the best,” Buffalo says. “That was so cool.”
Good nursing practice isn’t always about telling patients a certain way to do things, she adds. It’s also about listening.
“It’s about letting your clients be comfortable enough to voice to you what they use as their traditional health and wellness practices,” she says. “You have to meet your clients where they’re at and understand their stories.”
Buffalo’s interest in helping patients with wounds and ostomies sparked when she worked as a home-care case manager in the Maskwacis community in central Alberta, a group of four First Nations that includes the Samson Cree Nation where her mother grew up and where she still has family.
“I really like working with ostomies,” she says. “I love the patient teaching, empowering the patients to take care of their ostomies well.”
Buffalo attributes her self-described “passion” for wound and ostomy care to learning about the ostomy one of her aunts had, as well as to her experiences growing up on a large cattle farm north of Fort St. John, BC.
On the farm, she saw wounds, such as abscesses on cows, and helped her father with wound care on cattle and horses.
“You get to learn about life and birth and all the challenges that come during calving time,” she says. “Sometimes the outcomes are hard, sad. Blood and guts never scared me — complex wound care does not scare me. It challenges me.”
Initially, Buffalo was interested in veterinary medicine. But after living and working in the Yukon for a time, and then returning home with a young daughter to care for as a single parent, she chose nursing school.
Need for long-term management
She started her nursing career by working in the emergency department of rural hospitals, gaining experience in a broad spectrum of acute care that has served her well at the nursing station in Fort Chip.
The 12-hour shifts required in emergency medicine became harder as her daughter grew, so Buffalo switched to home care in Maskwacis. There she saw the need for long-term wound and ostomy care case management and earned her specialty certificate.
“My dream was to have a team that helped support our Indigenous communities across Alberta, whether in person or virtually, and to be able to support the nurses and the clients in their communities,” she says.
That dream began to become a reality when Buffalo was a student at the Wound, Ostomy Continence Institute and a member of Nurses Specialized in Wound, Ostomy and Continence Canada. The national association represents more than 600 nurses in the specialty, promotes high practice standards, and advocates for health-care policy that benefits patients.
The association’s leadership asked Buffalo to join the Indigenous Wound, Ostomy and Continence Health Core Program. The program, then in its infancy, brings together nurse specialists and health-care stakeholders who work with Indigenous people to identify and raise critical health-care issues with federal and provincial governments.
“Our voice has gotten stronger over the years,” she says. “We have helped to create policy changes, working with other entities like Non-Insured Health Benefits and Indigenous Services Canada.”
Through her involvement in the program, Buffalo proposed the creation of the Indigenous Wound, Ostomy and Continence Health Sharing Circle. The website, which she calls a work in progress, provides resources, education, training, and support for patients, specialist nurses, and other health-care providers, so they can connect in one spot and share information.
“The aim is to improve health care and accessibility for our Indigenous Peoples,” she says. “We’re always looking to add resources.”
Buffalo is also always seeking additional knowledge and resources to increase her own skills. She plans to start an advanced nursing master’s degree in wound, ostomy and continence online, through Curtin University in Perth, Australia, this year.
Buffalo hopes the knowledge the sharing circle disseminates, as well as the mentoring and teaching she does via Nurses Specialized in Wound, Ostomy and Continence Canada, will support her fellow nurses as they endeavour to help their patients stay in their home communities for treatment.
“You are empowering the nurses in these communities to take care of their community members, rather than always going out of the community to seek something when it could be readily available there,” she says.
The historic experiences of Indigenous people sent far from home for treatment in tuberculosis sanatoriums or to residential schools has left a legacy of trauma that makes them wary of travelling for medical help, Buffalo points out.
And she doesn’t believe they should have to.
“Indigenous communities are very strong and close-knit. People are supportive of each other,” Buffalo says. “Why shouldn’t there be these services in Indigenous communities?”
Laura Eggertson is a freelance journalist based in Wolfville, N.S.
#profiles
#chronic-conditions
#chronic-illness
#home-care
#indigenous
#infection-prevention-and-control
#patient-experience