Enhanced Mental Health Support for Yarrabah and Cairns First Nations Youth
Description
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.
Partners
Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service Aboriginal Corporation (GYHSAC) in Yarrabah, and Deadly Inspiring Youth Doing Good (DIYDG) Indigenous not-for-profit in Cairns
Impact
This research responds to policy calls for Indigenous community-driven initiatives to improve extant mental healthcare for Indigenous youth. The findings have been fed back to the community service providers and Indigenous youth to inform the co-design of novel youth-guided and community-driven ways to support mental health services for youth wellbeing.
Researchers
Professor Janya McCalman, Tina McDonald and Nicole CaelliIshak
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.”
“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.
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.
“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.
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