CRCATSIH Program 2: Healthy Communities and Settings
Program Leaders: Kevin Rowley / Leisa McCarthy
What’s the Program about?
Healthy Communities and Settings is about addressing health through a community and family focus and ensuring that health promotion for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people includes innovations at the broader community and social level. An individual’s health and wellbeing is strongly associated with the wellbeing and resilience of the communities in which they live. Improvements in individual health are more likely to be sustained over the long term when the social and physical environment is positive and supportive.
Some of the broader social and environmental factors identified as important to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health include:
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Relationship to Land;
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Connectedness to community and family;
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The impact of racism;
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Self-determination and community control.
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Identity.
Scope of the Program
Research results underscore the requirement for complex, community-led innovations to improve health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through supporting healthy social and physical environments. However, the systematic establishment and evaluation of such innovations is currently lacking.
Program 2 will address this knowledge gap by:
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Better understanding the determinants of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health in regionally defined settings through the development and use of tools that more accurately measure identified enabling environments for better health outcomes.
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Developing tools for auditing and monitoring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health determinants and outcomes, and evaluating interventions across a range of community, service delivery and policy settings.
Who will be able to use the work of the Program?
The main groups that will be able to use the outputs of Program 2 will be:
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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.
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations from other sectors.
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Local governments interested in reducing discrimination against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
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The education sector, by way of monitoring cultural safety aspects of the school environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
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Decision makers for the development and implementation of evidence-based policy.
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Corrections, law and justice sectors in the use of evidence for addressing issues of high prison rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through diversionary and offender rehabilitation programs.
Research projects
Some key projects within the Healthy Communities and Settings program will be:
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Evaluation of local government initiatives to reduce structural, race-based discrimination in their local communities.
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Establishment and evaluation of a regional Indigenous Health Promotion Network across community controlled organisations.
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Investigation of food security for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in urban areas.
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Development of feasible indicators of healthy environments based on the outcomes of these research projects, for use by community controlled and other organisations, researchers and policy makers.
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Training courses for the implementation and monitoring of health promotion initiatives that address the complex determinants of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.