Doctor and nurses are leaving Nunavik over water shortages that affect care

PUVIRNITUQ — Doctors and nurses in Quebec’s Nunavik region say constant water shortages are a factor that is pushing some colleagues to leave, in a region where retention of staff has long been an issue.

In the Far North, health workers can choose between working with the Cree of James Bay or the Inuit of Hudson Bay, according to Raphaëlle Carpentier, a nurse with the Inukjuak health clinic, or CLSC.

Many of them choose the former, “to have access to a certain comfort, meaning running water and cell service,” she said.

Her colleague, Raphaelle Durand, questions her own tolerance for the environment. “It’s not for everyone, not at all,” she said. “And even when you like it — I love the community, I love the role I play here — there are irritants like water where I ask myself: in 20 years will I still be able to deal with that? Surely not.”

Durand says the average length of service for a health worker in the north is 18 months. “After that, they’re burned out and they go back,” she said. However, a lack of workers means those who stay have to get used to constant turnover and the need to help new recruits adapt to the North.

“Recently, we lost a really good doctor,” Durand said. While the doctor had more than one reason to leave, they cited an unwillingness to continue offering lower-quality care due to a lack of water, Durand said.

The union representing nurses in the Bay James region says there have been a number of new hires recently. But it’s difficult to convince them to stay.

Muriel Beauchamp spent 20 years as a nurse at the Inuulitsivik Health Centre in Puvirnituq, and now works for the union, the Syndicat nordique des infirmières et infirmiers de la Baie d’Hudson. Over the years, she’s noticed an “enormous change” when it comes to recruitment.

“People don’t stay,” she said. “Some come for a stretch, like we say, often four weeks, then they don’t come back.” She thinks the water shortages have something to do with it.

Dr. Vincent Rochette-Coulombe, who works in Puvirnituq full time, feels the same. “There are two types of people who work in Nunavik: those who do three weeks, and those who do three years.”

As Beauchamp puts it, “We leave our families, we exile ourselves a little for while we go work. We know all that, we know it,” she said.

“But to arrive and have such poor conditions, to lack water, it doesn’t make us want to do all that. You need a certain comfort, a well-being.”

Given the regular water shortages, locals and workers are used to saving water. Everyone has an emergency container to be able to flush the toilet when the water stops running.

The lack of water is felt in a myriad of ways, including cooking, washing, cleaning and dishes. But Quebecers from the south seem to struggle most with having to go several days without a shower.

“It plays enormously on the morale of the troops,” says Liv Larsen, a material resources coordinator for the Inuulitsivik Health Centre. She herself remembers hitting a wall one day when she hadn’t showered for a week, and believed (falsely, it turned out), that the water truck had left.

“I started crying,” she said. “I had a moment of discouragement. It gets to you, inside.”

Manon Rancourt, who was a coordinator at the hospital services department, has often heard personnel state categorically: if they don’t have water, they want to go back.

“At some point people get irritable and it’s very understandable,” she said. Spending time in the Far North, she added, is a reminder of the abundance of life back south. “We don’t lack water, and if we lack electricity for half an hour we go crazy,” she said. “Up there, it’s not unusual to have no Internet and no TV.”

The workers stress that the lifestyle in Nunavik is different.

“It’s certain that you can’t take a long shower,” Rochette-Coulombe said. “And sometimes, we see big infections, you have people coughing on you all day, you want to wash and you can’t. Yes, I think it affects the retention of personnel.”

All the health workers acknowledged the fact that they can at least return south from time to time, where water is plentiful. The Inuit residents, they note, have no such break from the tough conditions.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 23, 2025.

Katrine Desautels received the support of the Michener Foundation, which awarded her a Michener-Deacon Investigative Journalism fellowship in 2025 to report the impact of the lack of access to water in Nunavik’s Indigenous communities. This article is the third in a series of four reports.

Katrine Desautels, The Canadian Press