Aboriginal health

Art Programs at Western Region Health Centre

Francine Riches describes the art programs that she runs at Western Region Health Centre and community health nurse Virginia Sitzler describes how they are finding new ways to engage and support the Aboriginal community

Video Transcript

Niguna Neenar Ngardarb. My name is Francine Riches. I’m a Bardi/Jawi woman from Ardyuloon in the West Kimberley. I’ve been working at Western Region Heath Centre for two years now. I give Indigenous people a voice in our organisation and help breakdown barriers. I make sure our services to Indigenous people our culturally appropriate.

I’m Virginia. I’m a Nurse and I’ve been working with Aboriginal people for a long time now. I enjoy it because people have a good sense of humour, they’re really funny and very resilient and strong.

Francine:  We work in Western Melbourne for the Western Region Health.  In the area where we work Aboriginal people often feel culturally and socially isolated. Aboriginal health work often focuses on regional and remote areas and that is good. But I feel people in the urban areas are missing out on culturally appropriate health care and community support. This issue has given me a real passion to work amongst Aboriginal urban people and help us best I can.

At the moment I’m the only Indigenous person in Western Region Health. I am a part of the Koori network; a group of Aboriginal people that meet once a month. Through this group I’m connected to the community and I can share information about our services.

One of the really important things that we do is run an art therapy program. I am an artist and I am able to use my skills to run art classes that engage people in a different way. Through the classes we can connect with people, explore how they are going with their health and link them up with services.

With art therapy it’s not confronting and it’s a roundabout way that people can talk about their health problems. People do open up and often that happens when we are sitting side by side making art. I’ll talk with them and if they need a referral, I’ll organise it and sometimes I’ll go with them and sit with them while they’re waiting.

Because we are a mainstream health service it can be a big step for Aboriginal people to feel okay about using us.   The art classes create a good sense of belonging and trust. We get to know each other and people feel comfortable about making that step.

It’s everyone’s space to share at the art therapy classes and people do feel like they can bring up very big personal issues. It’s a sort of healing process and it connects people back to their culture.

Since starting the art therapy, we’ve seen an increase of people accessing our service. People seem to feel more comfortable to come to us because we’re there. I think that we at Western Region Health Centre can learn from this, about how important it is to find the right way to engage with Aboriginal people.

I feel that it’s important to use non-medical access points to make health services less confronting and it makes our service more culturally appropriate to Aboriginal people.

Aunty Viv:    I’m an expert artist .. I uhm.. I do my artwork at home. I am so proud and honour to be with yous two. Yous are a really looking after us elders and we really love yous. And we never even want really anything.

When you bring the food, you bring it straight to our homes and you go to the other homes and give them to the elders… Oh I’d like to see a lot of things happen. My dreaming is to see a lot of things happen for my people like Francine and Virginia here they’re here to help us.

Francine: From all our programs we refer a lot of people to our dental service, women’s and men’s health, counselling and so much more. And we make sure that Aboriginal people are prioritised.

We learn a lot from the people we work with they give us just as much as we give them. It’s really by sharing and coming together as much as it is about health information.

When I look at the stats for Aboriginal health it breaks my heart. All people are dying so young. We need to stop this now. We need to make changes and break down barriers. It is essential that local programs like ours continue and that other positive ways of engaging Aboriginal people are explored by mainstream health services.

We must celebrate what we’ve done but face and overcome future challenges together.