THE POWER OF YARNING

When we saw the theme of this issue was Connection, it got us thinking about how important it is to have a yarn about your diabetes now and then, whether that yarning is with your family, with your health team, or with a health worker down at your local Aboriginal Medical Service. It’s good to just have a yarn about your concerns, as well as letting others share some important information. The more you talk, the more you’ll find support.

That kind of yarning is at the heart of how we’ve approached the training for our Aboriginal Health Worker Development project —the purpose of which is to get more Aboriginal health workers into remote Communities to deliver our Diabetes Education Self Management Yarning (DESY) programs. We know that Aboriginal health workers are best placed to talk to people within their own community, because they already have the respect, trust, knowledge and connection they need to nurture their clients.

We’ve just finished the last of the five-day training sessions with the new workers. We’ve now trained 20 Aboriginal health practitioners and 10 health professionals. Now we’re on to the mentoring stage and getting these these guys slowly on the pathway to be accredited diabetes educators.

It’s going to make a big difference to us. Now we’ve got so many people trained up across the State, the two of us won’t have to spend our time flying everywhere. We’ve got other people who can go in those communities and run the DESY sessions for us. We’ll support them to help plan their sessions and sort out venues and recruit clients, but they’ll be there on the ground, working with people they know and already have a connection with.

We led the DESY training as a kind of yarning group because we know that’s a good way to help people to relax and open up. It’s what DESY is all about. We’ll kick off the workshop by telling them a bit of a yarn about ourselves — a personal story, not a professional story. And that helps gets the rest of the people in the room in a relaxed atmosphere, which makes it easier for them to make a connection with you. Because when you’re opening up personally about yourself, they can relate to you.

Hopefully, that sets the scene for the rest of the workshop. It should feel like we’re just having a chat about diabetes. Even though we have a structure, they’re not really aware of it. What we’re really doing is we’re modelling that for the trainers. We tell them “when you’re running your DESY workshop, it’s not a structured format, with students sitting in front of a teacher like a classroom.”

We raise topics with open ended questions, so it feels like everyone is on the same journey. We’re just having a yarn and they’re learning about their diabetes and learning about their own journey and how to self-manage their diabetes.

The way that the comfort of a relaxed environment expresses itself can be surprising. At one of our sessions in Joondalup recently, one of the women taking part started weaving earrings while we were yarning. When the session was finished, she gave a pair to each of the participants. That’s a good example of community building!

It’s a particular skill being able to run a session that feels relaxed but still covers all the necessary material. What we’ve picked up on while running this pilot program is how this approach really works for Aboriginal health workers. It just seems to come more naturally to them compared to people from other populations.

We’re hoping this pilot program will just be the start of getting more Aboriginal health workers trained to deliver diabetes education in their communities. What happens next will be dependent on funding, but we know how important this project will be to people living with diabetes across Western Australia — particularly those living in Aboriginal Communities.