Consulting in remote Indigenous health: How effective is it?

Le résumé fourni par la source

There are many reasons why organisations and groups employ external consultants. The major two reasons are that the organisation wants a specific task done and doesn’t have the capacity to do it, or the organisation doesn’t know what it wants and needs someone to assist them with a process of clarification and progression. There are a small number of consultants in Australia who specifically consult on rural and remote health workforce education, evaluation and service planning. Our various reports often contain numerous well intentioned recommendations and strategies to progress these issues. This collaborative paper will examine the key activity of consultation with consumers and communities by reflecting through the lens of a number of these consultants. It will explore the issues of consulting with remote and Indigenous groups to achieve successful outcomes. The paper will address: (i) the complexities of the ‘outsider’ consulting with Indigenous groups and how one seeks effective engagement, establishes trust and avoids ‘consultation exhaustion’; and (ii) how to overcome the barriers to successful consultation processes. Janie Dade Smith RhED Consulting Pty Ltd I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we stand on here today, the land where I did most of my own growing up as a child and where my family still live today. I would like to thank the elders and the peoples of this land for their enduring patience as we work through the great health challenges that they face daily. This paper is a little different from the other papers you will hear at this conference this week. It is not a paper based on any great theory from someone else. It is not a paper that uses a PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate the great ways in which we do things. It is also not a paper that provides you with any answers at all really. It is more a reflective piece about how we do things as three consultants who work extensively in remote and rural communities throughout Australia in the provision of independent consulting services to health departments, universities, Aboriginal community controlled health organisations, government, non government and not for profit organisations. So consulting in remote Indigenous health—How effective is it? I suppose we could have written a one liner saying—not very, probably, but do we really know? In this paper today you are going to hear from three of us who often work together. First I am going to talk to you about the experiences I have had in consulting about remote Indigenous health as someone who runs their own consulting company, imaginatively named RhED Consulting, where in the past 5 years I have conducted around 35 consultancies and where about half of my work has been in the Northern Territory, where I also lived for 11 years in the ‘80s. I largely provide consulting services to develop education programs to help prepare health professionals to work in remote and Indigenous communities; and I evaluate programs and organisations to assist them to improve. In this paper I will reflect about the challenges that we often face as ‘outsiders’ coming in, with our often brutal timelines set by someone else

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.