Resource Hub

ABC.net – April 18, 2019: This news article provides coverage of Australia’s Labor Party announcement that they plan to invest more than $100 million in youth suicide prevention and other pediatric health initiatives, with a focus on Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are victims of 1/4 of youth suicide despite only representing less than 5% of young people in Australia. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said of the policy plan that Indigenous Australians “have the right to grow old.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics: This site outlines a wealth of information on life expectancy trends, population estimates, census information, medical phenomena, and other health-related behaviors among Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal Australians.

Australian Government Department of Health: This is the Australian Government’s official landing page where you can find information on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health statistics and trends.

Australian Human Rights Commission: This organization was established by the Australian Federal Parliament as an independent statutory group with the goal of protecting and promoting human rights for all Australians. This page gives an overview of the organization’s structure as well as outlining how to pursue discrimination complaints.

Australian Human Rights Commission – March 21, 2019: This release from the AHRC focuses on the enduring health gap between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australian residents. It looks at the work of the Australian Human Rights Commission on Close the Gap, a contemporary campaign geared towards raising life expectancies and improving health outcomes among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by 2030.

Australian Indigenous HealthInfo Net: The organization’s homepage for advancing research to provide policymakers and health practitioners with data on Australian Indigenous populations, supporting effective advocacy and practice.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: Reports and statistics on the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians can be found here on this hub.

CNN – January 29, 2018: Published in a nod to Australia Day Celebrations, CNN articulates the vastly differential health outcomes experienced by non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australian populations in this article. It contains several helpful infographics, including a geographic visualization of the Indigenous population.

Creative Spirits (Updated November 16, 2018): An information-packed page with selected statistics on the differentials between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous health outcomes. Measures include infant mortality rates, death rates, substance use rates, and much more.

Health Direct: This site provides coverage on the current state of Indigenous health and well-being in Australia, including a reference to the Closing the Gap initiative.

Indigenous Health in Australia (Wikipedia): While not reliable as a primary source, Wikipedia provides a wealth of validated information collected in one place. This page contains a plethora of references for health and wellbeing statistics on Aboriginal Australians, as well as providing a summary of colonization’s sociological impact on the Indigenous population.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: David Buxton, MBBS, MPH, a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg graduate, is highlighted in this release. Buxton grew up in Tasmania and went on to complete a four-month medical posting in Australia’s desert country; this biography details how he observed the preconceptions colleagues held about Aboriginal Australians contributing to faulty decision-making in metropolitan hospital practices and poor health outcomes. This experience motivated him to pursue his MPH.

National Geographic – January 31, 2019: This National Geographic article details the anthropological history of the Aboriginal Australian population, from original migration to the continent more than 50,000 years ago to Western colonization, discussing the challenges the Indigenous population faces in its wake.

Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health (OATSIH) (Wikipedia): Wikipedia’s page for OATSIH, a division of Australia’s Department of Health and Ageing. Established in 1994, OATSIH was founded to direct focus to the health needs of Indigenous Australians by using mainstream health initiatives and programs as vehicles.

OxFam International – January 22, 2018: This dispatch from Oxfam International discusses contemporary wealth distribution across the globe. In 2018, the world’s richest 1% received 82% of the created wealth from that year, while the bottom 50% of humanity did not receive any socioeconomic gains from productivity. This trend has significant ramifications for those populations that have been shut out from traditional means of production, including non-urban Indigenous Australians.

The Fred Hallows Foundation: This foundation is dedicated to improving vision outcomes among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, with a particular focus on ending avoidable blindness.

The Guardian – March 15, 2018: Data released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2018 is covered in this article from the Guardian. The statistics demonstrate that there is a higher incidence of and mortality from cancers among Indigenous Australians.

The Lancet – February 17, 2018: This editorial article from the Lancet covers the implementation of Australia’s Closing the Gap Strategy. While the policy is an important step towards addressing health disparities among Indigenous Australians, the author cites issues with policy inconsistencies and misunderstandings around implementation of the initiative that mandate a return to the original Statement of Intent.

The Medical Journal of Australia – February 18, 2019: A publication of study results on an initiative to assess the median urine iodine concentration of young adults in the Top End of Northern Territory. Researchers compared iodine concentration among the non-Indigenous and Indigenous populations of the region before and after the mandatory health directive to fortify bread with iodized salt. Urban Indigenous residents did have enough iodine after fortification, while remote Indigenous residents had increased but still insufficient iodine levels, the study found.

The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO): NACCHO’s central information page, which emphasizes that “the underlying causes of poor Indigenous health can be attributed to social and economic exclusion, unemployment, low income, poor housing and sanitation, poor education, and lack of adequate nutrition. Despite suffering from much worse health than other Australians, indigenous people generally have much less access to health care services. Historically, Indigenous people have had little power to influence these factors and the public policy decisions that affect their lives and health.”

The National Center for Biotechnology Information: A PubMed article detailing the challenges inherent in combatting the cancer outcome disparities between non-Indigenous Australians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The impact of primary health care service access on cancer outcomes is discussed at length.

West Coast Sentinel – May 3, 2019: Recent media coverage on the federal government’s pledging of $250,000 toward three distinct South Australian Aboriginal medical services: CKAHS, Nunyara, and Pika Wiya.

World Health Organization – October 2018: WHO shines a light on Australia’s Indigenous population’s unmet eye care needs. Most notably, the occurrence of blindness in Indigenous adults 40 and up is six times higher than the incidence among other Australians in the same age-ranges. Of this vision loss among the Indigenous population, 94% is preventable through routine surgery, maintaining regular clinical eye checks, and making accessible more hygienic washing facilities.

World Health Organization – 2018-2022 Country Cooperation Strategy: WHO’s strategy for regional platforms aimed at strengthening collaborative efforts to improve health security, strengthen regulations, and facilitate people-centered health systems. Together, these efforts promote universal health coverage in the Western Pacific Region, with a goal of implementation over the course of the next five years.

The strategy states this: “Despite Australia’s high life expectancy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to experience a greater health disadvantage and have a life expectancy of around 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians, with the proportion of indigenous people who experience disability being almost double that of non-indigenous people. A sustained effort is required to improve health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”