Aboriginal Voice

MOVING ON

Moving to Port Hedland means NATALIE JETTA is in a good place to start leading face-to-face sessions in Aboriginal Communities as we emerge from the COVID hiatus.

For the first time since 2020, I feel like there might be light at the end of the COVID tunnel. After two years of rolling cancellations and virtual workshops, I’m looking forward to getting back out there and running some face-to-face sessions. It’s the thing I love most about this job. I'm a social person. I love events. I love doing workshops. That first year of COVID was the worst, as all our NAIDOC week events got cancelled at the last minute, just as we were about to go out and do a whole lot of amazing stuff. But now I’m looking forward to running our first big event for Aboriginal Australians since the pandemic began. It’s a really cool one to get started with, as we’ve paired up with The Shooting Stars program – a youth mental health service for girls, based in Perth but catering for schools all over WA. They have a mental health day session coming up in Port Hedland and they’ve asked a bunch of health providers to come and have a talk to the girls about healthy eating. I’ll be talking to them about healthy lifestyles and what you can do to avoid diabetes. I’m really excited. The other big change for me is that I’ve moved from Perth to Port Hedland. Diabetes WA might be based in the South West, but we cater for our entire, massive state. I think it’ll be a real advantage for me to be based in the north and close to some of the Communities I work with. Things have been pretty quiet on the workshop front since I moved here in February, but I’ve used that time to start making connections and getting to know people around my new home. I've been popping down to the local clinic and met with health workers who want me to start working ASAP, but it’ll be a while until we know what the COVID situation is looking like. We all know how bad diabetes is across the remote Communities around here, but most health workers don’t have the in-depth knowledge or confidence to host diabetes sessions with their clients. Unfortunately, we’ve had to put our health professional training scheme on hold due to COVID, but we’re hoping to transform it into a virtual training module. I’m loving being up here so far – and not just because it’s so much warmer than Perth! I certainly won’t miss all the flying I had to do. But it’s a great spot from which to build on our community work in Broome and across the Kimberley and Pilbara. People in Communities are so much more likely to accept you and say yes if you're here, than they are if you’re based in Perth and chatting over the phone or email. I bump into people in the shops, I bump into them down the pub and all over the place. It's a much closer relationship. Working with Aboriginal people who are living with diabetes, I’ve seen first-and the difference it makes having a culturally safe program like DESY. It makes the people you’re working with feel a bit more at peace and a bit more relaxed. They’re more able to take on your information and actually implement it when they leave. If they're in a workshop that hasn't been made culturally appropriate, they're going to be a bit more withdrawn, a bit more held back and not take in so much of that information.

We talk a lot about the importance of culturally safe content when we’re working with Aboriginal Communities, but something that is often undervalued is culturally safe behaviour. That means the people who are coming in to work in those Communities have done cultural awareness training and also know the history and background of that town. They need to know what the Community is like, by doing some research and learning about it beforehand. When they are in that Community, they need to try to remain more open minded. You can’t just go in and tell people what to do, first you have to sit back and listen to their story. You need to start from where your client is, not from where you are. That’s how we start, by remembering that we’re guiding people in Aboriginal Communities through their own diabetes journey, not the one we might have already mapped out.

UP

Diabetes WA’s Telehealth Service is a free education and clinical support service for people living with diabetes in rural and remote areas of WA. It is open Monday to Friday 8:30am – 4:30pm.