CRCATSIH Program 1: Healthy Start, Healthy Life

Program Leaders: Ross Bailie / Tom Brideson

What’s the Program about?

Healthy Start, Healthy Life is about making sure that primary health care and health-related services are able to access and use innovations that will help them provide the best quality care to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The program aims to support end-users to deliver primary care that encourages a healthy start to life, and a long and healthy life, through:

• Reducing risk associated with tobacco consumption, obesity and diet.

• Improved early detection and effective management of chronic diseases.

• Improved maternal and child health outcomes (e.g. improved foetal health, infant mortality, birth-weight, reduced childhood infections and improved maternal morbidity and mortality).

Scope of the Program

Research carried out by the CRCAH and others has produced a range of tools and resources to support high-quality health care proven to be effective in various settings.
Program 1 will support the use of such innovations through two interwoven strands of activity:

1. Developing knowledge and capacity for effective implementation of innovations through high-quality research, evaluation and knowledge exchange.

2. Supporting the implementation of specific evidence-based innovations.

Who will be able to use the work of the Program?

The main groups that will be able to use the products of Program 1 will be primary care, public health and policy practitioners involved with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled health services and other primary health services and providers.
The program will also work closely with another group of service providers as intermediaries to support access to and use of the products of research, including:

• education providers

• professional associations

• health funders

• commercial providers of a range of services

• non-government agencies

• peak bodies

• online resource banks.

Research projects

Some key projects within the Healthy Start, Healthy Life program will be:

• Establishment of an Australian Indigenous arm of the International Tobacco project.

• Ongoing work to support improvements in quality of care by the Indigenous health sector, including:

  1. A national appraisal of Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) initiatives.

  2. Increased research capacity to support Indigenous primary health care centres to make improvements in quality of care at the regional and local level, through a National Partnerships project (leveraging NHMRC and industry funding contributions).

  3. Development of new tools that can be applied through CQI initiatives, such as the development of a tool that supports best practice care around the social and emotional wellbeing of children.

• Transition of three successful social and emotional wellbeing projects from research to applied and sustainable innovations for use in local communities:

  1. Resilience and parenting training developed by the Let’s Start program at the Charles Darwin University in Darwin.

  2. Facilitation training to deliver two empowerment interventions, the Family Wellbeing program and the Men’s Group program, developed by a partnership centred at Townsville’s James Cook University.

  3. Indigenous mental health care planning and other techniques, developed through the AIMHi project.