Introduction For a very long time now indigenous health has been a subject of debate amongst health care professionals. The fact that conventional health studies have failed to integrate indigenous health knowledge into conventional health studies is largely to blame for the stand off between proponents of indigenous health and opponents of indigenous health. Nursing practice in Australia Successful integration of indigenous health into contemporary health studies is only possible if health care professionals are going to incorporate the right strategies in the integration process.
Of importance is the fact that in the past conventional health care professionals have tended to alienate indigenous health professionals by viewing them as less qualified and pre-modern. Far from it, it has been found that providing indigenous health professionals with the necessary empowerment in terms of training significantly improves the health of indigenous people . Literature review and policies Research has shown that adopting indigenous approaches into health management greatly reduces mobility and mortality incidences amongst indigenous people.
A good example of this can be seen amongst the Aboriginal people of Australia . Another approach towards the achievement of total integration of indigenous health with conventional health is through inclusion of indigenous health education in the national curriculum for health care professionals which will serve to meet the needs of the indigenous population. However, this is not the case as many colleges and universities have only implemented those changes in piecemeal.
The challenge has been lack of government support given the fact that most indigenous people especially the marginalized are less endowed financially and therefore cannot afford to pay for their own training needs. Integrating indigenous health in curriculum of health professionals should also be reviewed as a way of closing the cultural, social differences amongst indigenous people. Integration of indigenous health serves to close some of the social gaps existing in the health care provision.
Barriers to achieving indigenous health provision have been identified as also arising from the skilled recruitment process of health care professionals. As a result, several measures have been put in place to ensure that application and enrolment of indigenous students is less bureaucratic given the fact that high levels of bureaucracy in university/college admission tends to put off would-be indigenous health students. Employement has also been found to put off many indigenous people from pursing indigenous health studies.
To curb this problem, indigenous people have been given preferential treatments when it comes to employment. Empowering indigenous health care professionals can serve to empower indigenous health in that it serves as a motivation to other potential health care professionals from the indigenous people. It has been noted that the slow pace with which the problem of indigenous health integration has gone through can be attributed to lack of dependable data on indigenous health professionals.
To overcome this problem, universities as well as health departments have come up with better data capture resources to enable the capturing of valid data for planning purposes . Cultural barriers have also been found to impede integration of indigenous health in mainstream health care provision. To overcome this barrier, efforts have been put to do away with all cultural barriers witnessed in health care provision in the past. One way in which cultural barriers have been overcome is by developing culturally sensitive materials for health care professionals, which do not discourage indigenous people, but rather empowers them .
Teaching indigenous health as a subject in undergraduate studies will see more of indigenous people retained in the colleges and therefore will see a higher output in terms of those students who graduate from indigenous communities. However, to achieve high retention numbers such students must be empowered through awarding of scholarships, awarding of travel allowances as well as constant provision of support to the indigenous people so that they may be able to overcome challenges which they face .
Teaching indigenous health is not enough if the academic staff involved in the teaching of indigenous health fail to appreciate the special status of indigenous people. As a result, efforts to achieve indigenous health have involved raising the level of cultural awareness amongst academic staff through training programs. Indigenous health should be taught as a stand-alone subject, subject to the development of a strong curriculum which is well balanced and specially designed to meet the special needs of indigenous people.
This is only possible if health professionals from those indigenous communities are involved in the curriculum design and development given the fact that by the virtue of belonging to the indigenous people they can better understand the predicament facing the indigenous people. It has been noted that the transition rates of indigenous people into post baccalaureate level is worrying. Therefore the above measures will serve to ensure that many indigenous people go past undergraduate level and become authorities in indigenous health.
This will serve to ensure that indigenous people have representatives at the planning levels and therefore their interests will be articulated in a better way. If indigenous health strategies are going to succeed, the support of the government is highly needed. This therefore calls for the enactment of strong legislations to support the integration of indigenous health studies into conventional/mainstream health studies. This is not to imply that there are no legislations in place to cater for indigenous health. It is rather an awakening call to the government for the need of stronger legislations to deal with the problem at hand.
The high numbers of unregulated health workers have been found to greatly impact negatively on health care provision. This is particularly the case given the fact that planning becomes difficult when there is no dependable data on the number of health workers operating nationally. This can negatively affect indigenous health provision in that unregulated entry into health care is likely to cause further marginalization of indigenous health professionals. To curb the above situation, standard nomenclature has been recommended to serve as a benchmark for determining those who can secure employement in the Department of Health.
Standard nomenclature procedures are carried out by the health department in conjunction with the Department of employement and workplace relations and also the Australian bureau of Statistics . The fact that there is nurses’ shortage nationally has a bearing on indigenous health. This is due to the fact that critics of indigenous health have tended to base their opposition on integrating indigenous health into conventional health on the fact that there are other urgent challenges facing the health care providers which should be given prominence.
In addition, nurses’ shortage has been found to have an impact on the quality of health care provided to the population . Until the problem of nurses’ shortages is well addressed, it may be very difficult to achieve indigenous health provision at the desired level as focus will always be shifted towards solving the problem of nurses’ shortages as opposed to having a well-balanced health care profession which takes care of all groups in the population and especially indigenous people. Amongst the solutions advanced towards solving the problems of nurses’ shortages is the import of labour from countries with a surplus of nurses.
To achieve this goal, visa applications for nurses have been streamlined to make it easier for those nurses seeking to work in Australia. As noted earlier, this approach does not take into consideration indigenous health provision given the fact that expatriate nurses do not have specialized knowledge on indigenous health. In addition, it becomes very hard to train expatriates on approaches such as indigenous health considering the fact that most of them are only in Australia on temporary basis.
It therefore appears that the only solution to solving the problem of under-representation of indigenous people in health care provision is through the empowerment of indigenous people to fully participate in health affairs. This calls for a high level of collaboration between government, local community, training institutions such as universities, leaders as well as other interest groups such as not-for-profit organizations. No matter how hard authors try to depict the society as homogenous, evidence points to the fact that the Australian society is very heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity.
This therefore means that health care managers cannot plan without putting into consideration ethnic issues. Ethnicity determines how well societies’ needs can be met. This is especially so considering the fact that different health conditions tend to show varied prevalences for different ethnic groups. This is a clear indication that approaching health care studies from an ethnic point of view can serve to easily resolve some of the medical conditions which health care providers have been grappling with for the past many years.