Addressing Medical Deserts: The Inuit Case

As part of the “Organizational Innovations in Health” course series for the Master 2 in Human Resource Management and Health, the INOS Chair is organizing a special conference at Grenoble IAE on Wednesday, April 29, 2026. This event, open to students, researchers, and professionals in the field, will have the honor of welcoming Céleste Fournier, Associate Professor at IAE Paris-Est. She will present her research titled: 

The Learning Pathways and Key Competencies of Nurses Working in Village Clinics in the Inuit Community of the Quebec Arctic. Lessons for Healthcare Leaders in a Medical Desert Context.

This presentation will focus on the nurses who ensure daily access to care for the fourteen Inuit communities, where they practice their profession, fulfill their responsibilities, and exercise autonomy with extremely limited resources and technical infrastructure. For these professionals, traveling to Nunavik represents a profound challenge—one that is at once personal, ethical, and civic. Céleste highlights the ambivalence of an experience that is as enriching as it is trying, in which each nurse must find her own strategy to “get through the sleepless night”—whether by expanding the scope of her care, limiting it, or sometimes choosing to leave clinic practice.

This meeting is an invitation to rethink our own healthcare systems. The lessons learned from the Arctic offer concrete ways to give greater recognition to nursing expertise. The discussion will focus, in particular, on finding a new balance between medical and paramedical professions, combined with effective knowledge transfer and greater safeguards for professional practices in our own regions facing challenges.