Mental health boost for Yarrabah and Cairns First Nations youth
A unique five-year project in Far North Queensland has highlighted the importance of youth voice and the role of Aboriginal Controlled Community Organisations (ACCOs) in improving the mental health and wellbeing of First Nations children and young people.
The CQUniversity research, in partnership with the Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service Aboriginal Corporation (GYHSAC) in Yarrabah, and Deadly Inspiring Youth Doing Good (DIYDG) Indigenous not-for-profit in Cairns, held yarning circles and co-design workshops with local young people and service providers to understand how the mental health and wellbeing of children and youth could be better supported.
CQUniversity’s Jawun Research Centre secured National Health and Medical Research Council funding for the project, and lead researcher Professor Janya McCalman said the project worked closely with both community organisations.
“More than half of Yarrabah’s and Cairns’ First Nations population is aged under 25, so improving support for young people’s mental health and wellbeing is a big priority for this region,” she said.
Prof McCalman - who is also Jawun Co-Director and a Professorial Research Fellow - and her team regularly consulted with young people and service providers across the project and identified a range of challenges for effective support.
“Young people told us they were reluctant to seek services, and providers felt there was an appetite for change,” Prof McCalman explained.
“We also found that most of the services provided were at the crisis end, for those in out-of-home care, or in youth justice system - and only about a third of services supported wellbeing generally.”
The research also highlighted the over-representation of non-Indigenous and government support services, which represented the majority of the local youth health and wellbeing services.
“Only a quarter of services were being delivered by ACCOs, and that was creating gaps in cultural appropriateness of support; and services’ connections to families and local First Nations community members and organisations. These were identified by our participants as important components of appropriate care models for young First Nations people,” she said.
“Service providers were also clear, a lack of First Nations led co-design in funding and accountability structures, as well as a lack of collaboration between ACCO and non-Indigenous service providers was hampering the capacity of services to provide appropriate mental health and wellbeing care for these young people."
Prof McCalman said the collaboration itself highlighted three priorities for improvement:
- Youth empowerment and leadership
- A shift from crisis to prevention
- Workforce training in culturally responsive, trauma-informed care.
CQUniversity was able to fund the delivery of trauma-informed, culturally-sensitive training to both partner organisations as part of the project.
Prof McCalman said the capacity-building has had considerable local impacts.
“All frontline staff at Gurriny Yealamucka attended the training, which is supporting them to meet changing needs in the organisation.
“We also supported DIYDG to more clearly define and articulate their model of care, and to develop a research team within their organisation,” she said.
“That’s helped them now grow to a substantial organisation with funding from multiple sources."
Prof McCalman said the project had implications across Indigenous communities and how research is conducted with communities.
"We took a collective impact approach to our research and its innovation lay in its community-directed approach to actually creating on-the-ground change for our partner organisations,” she said.
"Not everything worked, but we were able to support the articulation of local service system models, support capacity strengthening, advocate for more prevention approaches and highlight the need for long-term funding and Indigenous-led collaborative decision-making processes.”
The findings of the project were presented to community organisations, and to Queensland’s Department of Child Safety, Seniors and Disability Services.
A summary is available on CQUniversity’s Jawun Research Centre website.
Transcript
[Music] We're just completing a five-year project that was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, and working in partnership with two Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations here in Cairns and Yarrabah. So one was a youth organisation called DIYDG and the other one was a primary health care organisation called Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service.
The purpose of the project was to look at systems that support First Nation's children's and youth wellbeing, so we started out looking more narrowly at mental health and then we were advised by our project management group that we should broaden that out and look at the whole spectrum of wellbeing right from, you know, being well and healthy and so on all the way through to having mental illness.
And also we looked at the sort of systems right from sort of individual children's and youth wellbeing right through to the sort of service providers or service providers' communities. And the sort of the service system that that supports First Nations children and youth.
We worked very closely with the community partners and the whole project was really very community driven.
So there's a lot of evidence I guess in the literature about the fragmentation of mental health systems, and what we were looking at was how Indigenous communities made suggestions for improving the integration of service systems, and individual children and youth who needed care could get, you know, sort of integrated and wraparound care. And those who were well could be supported in wellness!
Initially we talked to young people and service providers. Young people told us that they were reluctant to seek services and service providers acknowledged that there were issues in service delivery and said that, you know, they felt that there was an appetite for change. That they wanted to be involved in the change process.
So we also mapped service systems and we found that most of the services that were being provided were at the crisis end, yeah, supporting kids who were in out-of-home-care, those with mental illnesses, those in the youth justice system for example. Whereas there was actually only about a third of services were being provided to actually you know support wellness.
And our service providers said a lot of our kids are falling through the system because there's nothing to support wellness at at the upstream end, you know.
I think that in this kind of space change is incremental, so there have been changes that have already occurred through the project. We used a very participatory and you know community-driven approach and along the way you know there have been changes.
For example with DIYDG one of our key partners we supported them to sort of more clearly define and articulate their model of care, there's been some capacity development of, you know, research staff within their organisation. They now have a research team actually within their organisation. We supported them to do some capability training in research, for example, and so you know that that organisation through the five years of the project has grown from a very small sort of voluntary organisation with maybe, I don't know, about four or five staff, to now being a fairly substantial organisation with funding from multiple sources and so on.
And yeah with Girriny you know the CEO of Girriny allowed all of their frontline staff, which was more than 70 staff, to attend a training session over two days in in culturally responsible trauma-informed care. It's been a very productive partnership I would say with both organisations, and you know it actually has led now on to further research in the space because yeah I think all of these issues, they're tricky issues. You could say that they're, you know, they're wicked problems. They don't go away you know with simple solutions that they require long-term effort and ongoing sort of partnerships, and really research is there to value-add to what's already happening in the community. [Music]
