The objective of this review is to document contemporary barriers to accessing healthcare faced by Indigenous people of Canada and approaches taken to mitigate these concerns. A narrative review of the literature was conducted. Barriers to healthcare access and mitigating strategies were aligned into three categories: proximal, intermediate, and distal barriers. Proximal barriers include geography, education attainment, and negative bias among healthcare professionals resulting in a lack of or inadequate immediate care in Indigenous communities. Intermediate barriers comprise of employment and income inequities and health education systems that are not accessible to Indigenous people. Distal barriers include colonialism, racism and social exclusion, resulting in limited involvement of Indigenous people in policy making and planning to address community healthcare needs. Several mitigation strategies initiated across Canada to address the inequitable health concerns include allocation of financial support for infrastructure development in Indigenous communities, increases in Indigenous education and employment, development of culturally sensitive education and medical systems and involvement of Indigenous communities and elders in the policy-making system. Indigenous people in Canada face systemic/policy barriers to equitable healthcare access. Addressing these barriers by strengthening services and building capacity within communities while integrating input from Indigenous communities is essential to improve accessibility.

In this paper, we present the results of the evaluation of three low-cost laser sensors and comparison with the standard device Metone Aerocet 531s which is capable of counting dust particles as small as 0.3 µm. The sensors used in this study are PMS5003 (Plantower), SPS30 (Sesirion), SM-UART-04L (Amphenol). During the measurement, the overall trend of the outputs from the sensors was similar to that of the Aerocet 531s. The PMS5003 sensor has a relatively small standard error in the all particle measurement ranges (<15 µg/m 3 in the low particle concentration range). All sensors have a high linearity compared to data from standard equipment, PMS5003: PM1.0 R 2 = 0.89; PM2.5 R 2 = 0.95; PM10 R 2 = 0.87; SPS30 PM2.5 R 2 = 0.95 and PM10 R 2 = 0.99; SM-UART-04L PM1.0 R 2 = 0.98. Three main sensor calibration methods (single-point calibration, two-point calibration and multi-point curve correction) with implementation steps for each method as well as their practical applications in calibrating low-cost air quality sensors according to standard measuring equipment are also detailed illustrated.

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