Aboriginal staff offer enormous advantages for remote area health services because they are more likely to contribute to a stable workforce, according to new research highlighted in this week’s column, which has a big focus on First Nations peoples’ health and wellbeing.
The column also brings the latest global health reports, including estimates that there are 19,000 children in the Gaza Strip who are unaccompanied or separated from their parents.
Don’t miss the tributes to public health legend Professor Mike Daube, public health priorities for the upcoming Queensland election, and a damning assessment of Australia’s efforts to promote physical activity. Skin cancer prevention, loneliness and a chicken pox outbreak are other issues highlighted.
The quotable?
Truth-telling should be strengths-based and invite non-Indigenous Australians to consider how First Nations perspectives, culture and connection to Country could play a more central role in the way Australia operates.”
Truth-telling
Croakey readers have until 6 September to make a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024, introduced in the Senate by Yamatji-Noongar Senator Dorinda Cox.
The Bill proposes to establish a Federal Truth and Justice Commission, to provide a national framework for truth-telling about the history and impacts of colonisation, dispossession, and systemic racism on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
The commission would also make recommendations on how to advance justice, healing, raise awareness and increase public understanding, and reconciliation for First Nations communities and the wider Australian society.
ANTAR has prepared some advice to aid submission-making, which includes the following points:
- The Albanese Government pledged to implement the Uluru Statement in full. The creation of a national Truth and Justice Commission would be an important step toward ensuring this commitment is not broken.
- Community-led truth-telling has been underway for many decades across the continent, often led by First Nations Peoples. A national Truth and Justice Commission backed by the Government would signal strong leadership and create greater awareness of these crucial community-led local truth processes, as well as support for state and territory-led truth processes.
- Truth-telling is an ongoing shared and active process between First Nations Peoples and non-Indigenous Australians that must be more than First Nations Peoples revisiting their trauma; this means the majority of Australians have a responsibility to engage in truth-listening to confront the ways in which the settler colonial system continues to benefit non-Indigenous peoples at the expense of First Nations rights.
- A national Truth and Justice Commission must operate alongside and as part of treaty readiness, with the intention to engage in national-level agreement making that rebalances power relations – without structural change, a truth-telling process risks becoming performative.
- The Government has not adequately listened to and acted on previous landmark truth-telling processes. The establishment of a national Truth and Justice Commission must include a commitment to meaningful action that ensures First Nations communities can exercise their right to self-determination. It is beyond time for governments to relinquish control and to hand meaningful decision-making power back to First Nations communities, where it belongs.
- Truth-telling should be strengths-based and invite non-Indigenous Australians to consider how First Nations perspectives, culture and connection to Country could play a more central role in the way Australia operates.
Meanwhile, the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry Queensland will begin with a ceremonial healing on Monday, 16 September, which will be open to members of the public. For those unable to attend in person there will be an online live stream broadcast. See here for more details.
First Nations health
The NSW Aboriginal Health Plan 2024-2034 has been released with the aims of driving change by:
- guiding how health systems are planned, delivered, and monitored
elevating the focus on Aboriginal expertise to drive shared decision-making and innovative collaborations
influencing the redesign of health services to achieve health equity
providing direction for the elimination of racism in all aspects of health care.
Its vision is ‘Sharing power in system reform to achieve the highest levels of health and wellbeing for Aboriginal people’.
A new study led by Menzies School of Health Research has uncovered a staff turnover rate of 151 percent each year, on average, in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service (ACCHS) clinics in regional and remote Northern Territory (NT) and Western Australia (WA).
Published last week in Human Resources for Health, this landmark study also revealed that turnover of Aboriginal staff was half that of non-Aboriginal staff, suggesting that hiring local staff can potentially lead to greater stability.
The researchers utilised payroll data from 11 of the 39 ACCHSs across WA and the NT, to track staff employment, measuring annual turnover and 12-month stability rates from 2017-2019.The participating ACCHSs provide care to about 63,500 Aboriginal people living in 30 communities.
Self-determination in programmes of perinatal health for Aboriginal Communities: A systematic review
Gaza crisis
The World Food Programme (WFP) announced on Wednesday a pause in the movement of its employees in Gaza until further notice following an attack on a team returning from an aid delivery mission on Tuesday evening, just metres from an Israeli-controlled checkpoint.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/08/26/israel-palestinian-healthcare-workers-tortured
Other global health news
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/08/1153706
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJs6CYeAPG8
The Lancet Public Health: Financialisation: a 21st century commercial determinant of health equity
Public health
Lack of progress in physical activity in Australia: decades of national inertia?
Australia’s efforts to promote physical activity have been fragmented and uncoordinated, say these authors.
The Commonwealth Health Department’s ‘National Preventive Health Strategy 2021–2030 hardly mentioned physical activity, other than in relation to the built environment or clinical obesity prevention.
By contrast, most Western European countries are ‘on track, high certainty’ to meet the WHO 2030 target as a result of long-term coordinated policy actions.
“… insufficient physical activity remains a public health failure in Australia relative to other high-income countries and in an area where the benefits would include societal wellbeing and environmental gain, as well as a broad suite of health improvements.”
… and a warm tribute to Professor Mike Daube for 50 Years of Service to Public Health
#AusPol
https://anmj.org.au/right-to-disconnect-what-does-it-mean-for-nurses-and-midwives/
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