A joint project between The Kids Research Institute Australia and The University of Western Australia (UWA) will focus on improving cultural safety in mental health services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people.
Led by Professor Helen Milroy – Honorary Research Fellow and co-director of Embrace at The Kids Research Institute Australia, and Stan Perron Chair of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Psychiatry at UWA and the Child and Adolescent Health Service – a team of The Kids and UWA researchers will aim to produce evidence-based guidelines for mental health services working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people and their families.
The project, funded by a Federal Government Medical Research Future Fund grant, ties in with a similar project already being undertaken at UWA, but focused on adults. It will be supported by the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, which will use insights gained to guide future reforms.
Professor Milroy said the team would first assess current experiences for children, young people and their families accessing the mental health system as well as some of the staff providing care.
We will speak with the families, children and young people to see how they view these services, whether or not they’re culturally safe, and what that means to them.
“We want to understand whether, or how well, healthcare providers recognise things like kinship systems, child-rearing styles, and child development within an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander model of social and emotional wellbeing.”
“From that we will develop a set of evidence-informed principles that we can use to inform to service providers, which outline the best ways of supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander clients in culturally safe ways.”
Professor Milroy said if families felt safe accessing mental health services, they were likely to present earlier, engage more easily and have better outcomes.
There are still a lot of cultural barriers, mistrust, misunderstanding and stigma associated with mental health services which need to be overcome.
“We also know there is a large unmet need in our communities and if we really want to ‘close the gap’ in life outcomes, then we need to improve cultural safety. We have come a long way but there is a lot more we can do.
“We also know mental health and trauma are top priorities in our communities and we want to make sure that they are on the journey with our research team each step of the way.”
Other researchers involved in the two-year project include (from UWA): Professor Pat Dudgeon, Professor Sean Hood, Michael Mitchell, Associate Professor Mathew Coleman, Professor Michael Small, Dr Shraddha Kashyap, and Dr Jemma Collova; and from The Kids Research Institute Australia, Professor Ashleigh Lin, Dr Alix Woolard, and Dr Marshall Watson.