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This systematic review will attempt to begin the fusion of Aboriginal health and Aboriginal education to show the need for strategic research and policy development that brings these two important fields together for the benefit of improving the lives of Aboriginal people regardless of residency or socioeconomic conditions.

A search of published and gray literature that examined Aboriginal health and Aboriginal education was conducted. Through computerized database (PubMed, PsycInfo, ERIC, Google Scholar, and Google) searches were performed in November 2014 to find abstracts, articles, gray literature, and reports pertaining to Aboriginal health and Aboriginal education in Canada.

Inadequate datasets impede the ability to look at Aboriginal health and education in Canada as there are no national datasets that adequately provide data to do more than cross-sectional analysis. By conducting research in a pan-Aboriginal manner negates that there is traditional worldviews that individuals, families, and communities embrace and embody in their daily lives. It is necessary for the Canadian government and society to work with Aboriginal people to change the fundamental ways in which the macro-level systems work together in order for true social change to occur which will lead to increased self-determination specifically in Aboriginal health and education.

The chapter reveals that Aboriginal health and education are key determinants to the health and well-being of Aboriginal people. Identity, self-determination, and Aboriginal worldviews need to be a part of research studies in order to have “two-eyed seeing” of the intertwined and interconnectedness of health and education.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

Despite health inequities experienced by Aboriginal and transgender (trans) communities, little research has explored the well-being of Aboriginal trans (gender-diverse) people. This paper aims to describe barriers to well-being in a sample of Aboriginal gender-diverse people in Ontario, Canada.

In 2009-2010, 433 trans people in Canada's most populous province participated in a multi-mode health survey. In all, 32 participants identified as First Nations, Métis, or Inuit (Aboriginal); unweighted frequencies were calculated to describe their characteristics.

Participants expressed diverse gender identities; 44 per cent identified with the pan-Aboriginal term two-spirit. High levels of poverty (47 per cent), homelessness or underhousing (34 per cent), and ever having to move due to being trans (67 per cent) were reported. In all, 61 per cent reported at least one past-year unmet health care need. Most participants had experienced violence due to being trans (73 per cent) and had ever seriously considered suicide (76 per cent). One-fifth had been incarcerated while presenting in their felt gender. Aboriginal spirituality was practiced by 44 per cent, and 19 per cent had seen an Aboriginal Elder for mental health support.

Action is needed to address the social determinants of health among Aboriginal gender-diverse people. Using principles of self-determination, there is a need to increase access to health and community supports, including integration of traditional culture and healing practices. Larger study samples and qualitative research are required.

These first published data regarding the health of Aboriginal gender-diverse Ontarians illustrate both their heterogeneity and all-too-common experiences of individual and systemic discrimination, and barriers to care. Results highlight potential impacts of colonialism and social exclusion, and suggest priorities for ameliorative action.

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications services in many health services is limited, leaving enormous gaps in the broad understanding of its role in health care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to address a specific (intercultural) area of healthcare communications consumer disadvantage; and it examines the potential for ICT exploitation through the lens of a conceptual framework. The opportunity to pursue a new solutions pathway has been amplified in recent times through the development of computer-based ontologies and the resultant knowledge from ontologist activity and consequential research publishing.

A specific intercultural area of patient disadvantage arises from variations in meaning and understanding of patient and clinician words, phrases and non-verbal expression. Collection and localization of data concepts, their attributes and individual instances were gathered from an Aboriginal trainee nurse focus group and from a qualitative gap analysis (QGA) of 130 criteria-selected sources of literature. These concepts, their relationships and semantic interpretations populate the computer ontology. The ontology mapping involves two domains, namely, Aboriginal English (AE) and Type II diabetes care guidelines. This is preparatory to development of the Patient Practitioner Assistive Communications (PPAC) system for Aboriginal rural and remote patient primary care.

The combined QGA and focus group output reported has served to illustrate the call for three important drivers of change. First, there is no evidence to contradict the hypothesis that patient-practitioner interview encounters for many Australian Aboriginal patients and wellbeing outcomes are unsatisfactory at best. Second, there is a potent need for cultural competence knowledge and practice uptake on the part of health care providers; and third, the key contributory component to determine success or failures within healthcare for ethnic minorities is communication. Communication, however, can only be of value in health care if in practice it supports shared cognition; and mutual cognition is rarely achievable when biopsychosocial and other cultural worldview differences go unchallenged.

There has been no direct engagement with remote Aboriginal communities in this work to date. The authors have initially been able to rely upon a cohort of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with relevant cultural expertise and extended family relationships. Among these advisers are health care practitioners, academics, trainers, Aboriginal education researchers and workshop attendees. It must therefore be acknowledged that as is the case with the QGA, the majority of the concept data is from third parties. The authors have also discovered that urban influences and cultural sensitivities tend to reduce the extent of, and opportunity to, witness AE usage, thereby limiting the ability to capture more examples of code-switching. Although the PPAC system concept is qualitatively well developed, pending future work planned for rural and remote community engagement the authors presently regard the work as mostly allied to a hypothesis on ontology-driven communications. The concept data population of the AE home talk/health talk ontology has not yet reached a quantitative critical mass to justify application design model engineering and real-world testing.

Computer ontologies avail us of the opportunity to use assistive communications technology applications as a dynamic support system to elevate the pragmatic experience of health care consultations for both patients and practitioners. The human-machine interactive development and use of such applications is required just to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare and the growing health knowledge transfer environment. In an age when the worldwide web, communications devices and social media avail us of opportunities to confront the barriers described the authors have begun the first construction of a merged schema for two domains that already have a seemingly intractable negative connection. Through the ontology discipline of building syntactically and semantically robust and accessible concepts; explicit conceptual relationships; and annotative context-oriented guidance; the authors are working towards addressing health literacy and wellbeing outcome deficiencies of benefit to the broader communities of disadvantage patients.

In partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA), the strengths-based National Empowerment Project (NEP) brought together researchers from across Australia and began to address issues surrounding Aboriginal wellbeing and, in particular, the high rates of Aboriginal deaths by suicide. The NEP utilised participatory action research (PAR) and was concerned with promoting positive cultural, social, and emotional wellbeing (CSEWB) and building capacity and resilience within Aboriginal communities. Throughout the NEP, consultations with 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities led to the development of a CSEWB program. The program seeks to increase self-determination and empowerment, developing participants’ awareness of a variety of issues relevant to wellbeing. This enables participants to gain a greater understanding of the holistic nature of CSEWB and the complex influences on Aboriginal wellbeing at individual, family, and community levels. This chapter is concerned with the development and delivery of the CSEWB program within three community sites in Perth, Western Australia. Shared philosophical approaches of the CSEWB program, between UWA and Aboriginal communities were human rights and social justice, community ownership, community capacity building, a strong focus on resilience, empowerment and partnerships, respect for local knowledge, and the delivery of community consultations. Investigation into the impacts of the program are based in an anti-colonial space, employing Indigenous Standpoint Theory and PAR approaches. This chapter demonstrates the success of the CSEWB program, links this success to the vital importance of Indigenous research ethics, and positions the research within an empowering and capacity-building context.

Over recent decades, research institutions have prescribed discrete ethics guidelines for human research with Indigenous people in Australia. Such guidelines respond to concerns about unethical and harmful processes in research, including that they entrench colonial relations and structures. This chapter sets out some of the limitations of these well-intentioned guidelines for the decolonisation of research. Namely, their underlying assumption of Indigenous vulnerability and deficit and, consequently, their function to minimise risk. It argues for a strengths-based approach to researching with and by Indigenous communities that recognises community members’ capacity to know what ethical research looks like and their ability to control research. It suggests that this approach provides genuine outcomes for their communities in ways that meet their communities’ needs. This means that communities must be partners in research who can demand reciprocation for their participation and sharing of their knowledge, time and experiences. This argument is not purely normative but supported by examples of Indigenous research models within our fields of health and criminology that are premised on self-determination.

Aboriginal people across Australia have diverse practices, beliefs and knowledges based on thousands of generations of managing and protecting their lands (Country). The intimate relationship Aboriginal people have with their Country is explored in this chapter because such knowledge is important for building insight into the relationship between social and ecological systems. Often in research Aboriginal views have been marginalised from discussions focused on their lands to the detriment of ecosystems and human health. This chapter aims to understand if such marginalisation is evident in Western human–nature relationship discourses.

This chapter provides a critical literature review which examines whether Aboriginal people’s diverse understanding of their ecosystems have been incorporated into human–nature theories using the biophilia hypothesis as a starting point. Other concepts explored include solastalgia, topophilia and place.

Critiques of these terminologies in the context of Aboriginal people’s connection to Country are limited but such incorporation is viewed in the chapter as a possible mechanism for better understanding human’s connection to nature. The review identified that Aboriginal people’s relationship to Country seems to be underrepresented in the human–nature theory literature.

This chapter emphasises that the integration of Aboriginal perspectives into research, ecological management and policy can provide better insight into the interrelationships between social and ecological systems.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, summarize and assess literature focused on developing social marketing programs for Aboriginal people.

The authors conducted a literature search and review of research papers concerning social marketing and Aboriginal populations over the period 2003-2013.

The research reveals very little published research (N = 16). The literature points to a wide range of findings including the importance of segmenting/targeting and avoiding pan-Aboriginal campaigns; cultural importance of family and community; the importance of multi-channels; universal value of mainstream and Aboriginal media outlets, use of print media, value of elders and story-telling for message dissemination; increasingly important role of Internet-based technology; need for campaign development to reflect Aboriginal culture; and importance of formative research to inform campaign development.

Considerable research is warranted to better develop more effective social marketing campaigns targeted to Aboriginal audiences to improve health outcomes for such groups across the globe.

This paper provides a baseline foundation upon which future social marketing research can be built. It also acts as a call to action for future research and theory in this important field.

The purpose of this paper is to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (ATSI), it is expected that non-ATSI health-care professionals become culturally aware; however, participants’ perceptions of the relative merit of cultural awareness training (CAT) formats is uncertain.

The authors compared undergraduate students’ perceptions of an asynchronous online format with onsite delivery formats of CAT using a mixed-method design. Students from five successive cohorts (n = 64) in an undergraduate programme were invited to complete a post-training survey which gathered quantitative and qualitative data.

Whilst feedback was positive regarding both formats, the onsite format was preferred qualitatively with several valuable learning outcome themes emerging from the results. These themes included; “perceived benefits of self-evaluation of students’ own culture whilst learning about Aboriginal culture”; “encouraging to be provided with scenarios, examples and exercises to enhance cultural awareness” and “engagement with the interactive facilitator approach”. There were differing views about the benefits of learning the history of oppression which warrant further research.

Results may be applicable to undergraduate allied health students who participate in clinical immersion placements (CIPs) who participate in Aboriginal CAT.

Given the changing dynamic in education forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, more resources may need to be directed to improving online training and possibly combining formats in course delivery.

The strength of the study is that the authors achieved a response rate of 100%, thus the results are highly significant for the sample. This sample represents 41.3% of chiropractic students who attended CAT and CIPs at this university over the course of 9 years, thus the results could be generalized to chiropractic students who participated in these types of placements.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare student perceptions of different formats of Aboriginal CAT for final year chiropractic undergraduate students in Australia.

This paper aims to compare the health status of Roma in Europe and Aborigines in Australia, examining access to health care (both primary and long‐term), administrative and communication problems, environmental risks associated with location of residences, women's health, substance abuse and mental health.

The paper discusses issues generated by cultural practices by both health care providers and the target groups.

Both Roma and Australian Aborigines have significantly poorer health status than the majority of the societies they are embedded in, and are clearly amongst the most disadvantaged members of their respective societies. Nevertheless, affirmative action programs for Aboriginal people over the last 40 years have produced some significant changes, with Aboriginal doctors and nurses, and culturally appropriate service provision being found in many areas.

Although there are considerable similarities between the health status and situation of Romanies and Australian Aborigines, clearly, there are also substantive differences. The paper suggests possible culturally appropriate service provision for Roma, based on Australian Aboriginal experiences and models.