Moving Forward Together in Aboriginal Women's Health: - Theses ...

Moving Forward TogetherJanet Kellyrange of other service providers. Skills and activities in networking need to besupported by health services and managers and seen to be core business.Addressing issuesThe third aspect that this research involved identifying wider issues that affectAboriginal women’s health and well being, and finding pragmatic ways toaddress them. Specific issues related to ongoing colonisation, discriminationand exclusion effects and health care access and experiences were highlightedin this research. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal co-researchersacknowledged that while non-Aboriginal people may experience similar issuesto Aboriginal people, very few experience the compounded effect of multipleand intergenerational issues complicated by ongoing colonisation policies andpractices . This research found that in order to improve health and health careaccess, issues related to colonisation and exclusion need to be positivelyaddressed. This would require multi agency, policy and political changes suchas those described in the Close the Gap Campaign (Oxfam Australia 2008) andthe nine principles of the National Strategic Framework for Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Health 2003-2013 (2004).In relation to health care provision, Aboriginal community women and healthprofessionals identified the importance of healing in health care to positivelyaddress these issues. There are many different parts to the concept of healing.Aboriginal community women sought collaborative programs that couldcounter their experiences of being ignored, unseen, unheard, unrecognised,misunderstood and marginalised. They imagined a supportive health careenvironment that could help them to address the high levels of stress they wereexperiencing in their lives. They identified the need for relationships betweenhealth services and themselves to be improved and strengthened, or in theirwords, to heal, before they could re-engage with the health system. Theyindicated that sometimes accessing a health service was a personally andculturally unsafe activity and that in order to (re)engage, old hurts,expectations and experiences needed to be healed.Health professionals also spoke about the importance of healthy environmentsand healing for themselves. They discussed being caught between community339