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Purro Birik - (Healthy Spirit)
5.5 Workforce Development
Issues
Workforce development
issues were raised consistently throughout the consultations. The main
issues were that:
-
mainstream health services
often fail to acknowledgment the skills and knowledge of Koori health
workers, resulting in second rate outcomes;
-
burnout is a major issue
for Koori health workers, due to poor access to debriefing, lack of
supervision, isolation from other similar workers, and lack of role
clarification;
-
some Koori communities lack
confidence in Koori health workers as a result of inadequate training and
inappropriate handling of confidential information;
-
there are limited
opportunities to recruit young Koori community members into social,
emotional and cultural wellbeing work - this adds to the difficulty in
engaging young people to be more health conscious and to address youth
health issues; and
-
community expectation in
some instances places Koori health workers in the position of trying to
respond to community needs beyond their resource capacity. This often leads
to burnout.
5.6 Capability of Koori
Health Services
This grouping of issues
raised in consultations relates to services that are not provided as well as
they could be, due to funding, organisational or training constraints.
Inevitably, poorer health
outcomes for communities are a consequence of services having limited
capacities for: early intervention; health promotion and prevention
strategies; support and respite for carers, siblings and/or children of
people in distress; access to culturally sensitive supported accommodation;
and support for people experiencing grief and loss. A number of the
consultations identified an urgent need to address the capability of Koori
health services to provide these type of services more effectively.
Also raised in the context
of issues that influence service capability were: case load size; workers
not being replaced when they take leave (which is particularly significant
in small services); lack of resources for ongoing education and training of
Koori health workers in social, emotional and cultural wellbeing issues; and
the shortage of Koori clinically trained mental health workers.
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