92441 Contemporary Indigenous Health And Wellbeing

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (2018), the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islander people suffer from health in-equality due to the poor social determinants of health. The following assignment aims to analyse how I am going to shape my future working experience as a registered nurse (RN) under clinical settings in community level. The paper will initiate with my personal reflection through Gibbs reflective cycle and then will highlight my three different weeks of yarning cycle activity and how these activities helped me increase my involvement with the Aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islander people.

While I was assigned to work on the subject of contemporary health and well-being of the indigenous population in Australia, I was bit surprised. The first thing that came to my mind was why a population which is barely civilised can gain such an importance that we are required to conduct a study over it. My experience about Aboriginal population before commencing this subject was completely different. I used to think that this group of population are barriers towards modernization in Australia. Aboriginals or Torres Strait Islanders suffers from unemployment and substance abuse and thus a burden over the society.

While learning more about this subject, a personal evaluation occurred within me. Before I was to think that the aboriginals people, the people with darker skin are illiterate and are not civilised enough to enter into the main race of the society. However, while learning more about their culture, civilization and way of living, I gradually came to realization that my though process about them was biased. Via going through the statistics I cam e to an understanding that their deprivation, lack of proper access to the healthcare services and lack of proper exposure and governmental support is the reason behind their lack of progression. This analysis of their past history opened my mind and changed my perspective toward them. I started developing a sympathetic corner for them and generate a tendency to know more and work for them in order to reduce this health inequality among the Aboriginal population.

The things which well badly is my biased attitude towards the Aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islanders people. According to Ecker et al. (2014), biased attitudes of the non-indigenous population are the reason behind the increase in the health-inequality among the Aboriginal population. This biased attitude is the reason behind the social isolation of the aboriginal people and this given rise to inequality. Health inequality and lack of proper employment and financial support make them suffer from depression and thereby becoming victims of substance abuse (Skinner et al. 2013). 

The thing which went right is providing me with an opportunity to research and know more about the Aboriginal community. These readings acted as an eye-opener. It helped me to overcome from my pre-conceived notion about the Aboriginal population in Australia and I gradually came across the actual harsh reality. I understood that inequality and negligence from the society are reason behind their poor health status and health inequality. This positive approach will help me to understand the health-related consequences about the Aboriginal people. The overall positive approach can be improved further via indulging into effective communication with the aboriginal population. This effective communication through inter-personal communication skills will help me to understand their though process and hurdles in experiencing health inequality. According to UTS Indigenous Graduate Attributes, it is the duty of the nursing professional to understand the basic aspect of the gaps in knowledge of the Aboriginals and act in a culturally competent manner.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight that at the before commencing the subject I should have overcome my pre-conceived understanding about the Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islander. This would help me to overcome my biased attitude towards them. The positive feelings are I gradually overcame my biased attitude via studying in deep about them. I could have transformed my overall experience further via indulging into effective communication with the Aboriginal people. During the experience I learned about myself that I get easily carried away by the prevailing notion in the society without judging the whole concept by myself. However, I one positive thing about me, I always attempt to study about the actual scenario while required and this helped me to know the actual truth.

Thus the main priority areas that I am required to develop is to indulge into effective communication with the Aboriginal people through working on my intrapersonal communication skills. Developing my intrapersonal communication skills will help me to interact with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in a culturally competent manner. This will help me to know more about their health inequality and about their health status. According to Sharifian (2013) communicating in a culturally competent manner with the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islander people help to generate person-centred care plan under clinical settings and also helps to promoted informed decision making. The specific steps that I will take in order to improve my intrapersonal communication skills is obtaining effective communication training from an registered nurses under clinical settings during a course of 6 months.

My predetermined notions about the Aboriginals have been changed after my participation in the yarning circle with the aboriginals. The yarning cycle for 3 weeks consisted of a debate concerning the subject- A high incidence of alcohol consumption among the aboriginals, a home visit to Judy (an aboriginal) to know about the culture and their experiences and a group discussion with the aboriginals about the high prevalence of the chronic diseases among the aboriginals.

First activity- Debate on the high prevalence of alcohol consumption among the aboriginals than the non- aboriginal counterparts.

There were 6 participants for the debate 3 speaking against the concept and three speaking for the concept. As a participant, I was speaking for the concept as I also believed in the fact that aboriginal people are more likely to be addicted to the alcohol and which I thought to be one of the reason towards their sufferings. As per Gray  et al., (2012),the aboriginals and the Torres Strait Islanders are 1.2- 1.3 times likely to consume alcohol at the levels that can cause health risks among the Indigenous people and that the aboriginal men are more than twice more likely to consume alcohol than the women. I have also found out that alcohol accounted for an estimated 8.3 % of the overall burden of the disease (Roche et al. 2015). While confronting with the person who was talking against the topic, I came to know about the fact that alcohol use among the Aboriginal people. I thought that the context is required to be understood from the social and the historical context of colonization, where it was the white Australians under the authority who were actually the one to introduce the aboriginals towards Binge drinking (Sherwood 2013).

Second activity- visiting to Judy’s house

Visiting Judy’s house was another part of the activity, where we met her family members and the got the opportunity to understand about their culture. It is from them that we came to know about their concepts of kingship and the story of colonization and how alcohol was used in lieu of money, which led to the prevalence of alcohol consumption among the aboriginals. We have also come to know how the dark history of the aboriginals are still affecting the youths who are falling prey to substance abuse.

Third activity

A group discussion was conducted with some aboriginal participants as well as the non-aboriginal participants regarding prevalence of chronic diseases among the aboriginals. Previously I had an idea that the prevalence of the chronic conditions might be because of the life style of the aboriginals and their health literacy. As per the data the aboriginal people are disproportionately affected by the chronic diseases like cardiovascular diseases, cancer and chronic kidney diseases (Sherwood 2013). While the discussion we came to know about the real reasons behind the wide prevalence of the diseases. It is true that the health literacy among the aboriginal people are low and they are less likely to get equal treatments in hospitals. Hence, discrimination and racism was found to be the main reason for the low health literacy and unequal care (Kelaher 2014).

Thus from the above discussion, it can be concluded that having a proper knowledge about the level of deprivation in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait  Islander population helps to indulge in effective communication skills with the Aboriginal population. This effective communication skill is an important aspect of graduate nurse which helps in the development of therapeutic relationships with the Aboriginal population. This approach is again proposed by the National Standards for the Registered Nurses (2.4) which promote that is the duty of the nursing professional to help the service users to participate in informed decision making process with the organisational and management structures.

References

Australian Human Rights Commission. (2018). Social determinants and the health of Indigenous peoples in Australia – a human rights based approach. Access date: 8^th October 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/news/speeches/social-determinants-and-health-indigenous-peoples-australia-human-rights-based

Ecker, U.K., Lewandowsky, S., Fenton, O. and Martin, K., 2014. Do people keep believing because they want to? Preexisting attitudes and the continued influence of misinformation. Memory & cognition, 42(2), pp.292-304.

Gray D, Cartwright K, Stearne A, Saggers S, Wilkes E, Wilson M (2018).Review of the harmful use of alcohol among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Australian Indigenous Health.

Kelaher, M.A., 2014. Experiencing racism in health care: the mental health impacts for Victorian Aboriginal communities. Education, 55(56), pp.8-3.

Roche, A., Kostadinov, V., Fischer, J., Nicholas, R., O’Rourke, K., Pidd, K. and Trifonoff, A., 2015. Addressing inequities in alcohol consumption and related harms. Health promotion international, 30(suppl_2), pp.ii20-ii35.

Sharifian, F., 2013. Cultural linguistics and intercultural communication. In Language and intercultural communication in the New Era (pp. 74-94). Routledge.

Sherwood, J., 2013. Colonisation–It’s bad for your health: The context of Aboriginal health. Contemporary Nurse, 46(1), pp.28-40.

Skinner, T.C., Blick, J., Coffin, J., Dudgeon, P., Forrest, S. and Morrison, D., 2013. Comparative validation of self-report measures of negative attitudes towards Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. Rural and remote health, 13(2), pp.1959-1.