Meet Griffith University Associate Professor Shannon Springer. In this webinar, he provides an overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teaching in medicine in the last 20 years, and discusses overcoming the ongoing challenges to meaningful learning and teaching opportunities around First Peoples Health.
Good evening hi good morning is it dr springer yeah yeah yeah shannon how are you going and yeah good thanks i’m chris from oztrack yeah nice to meet you chris likewise likewise thank you um thank you for making time um everyone is uh everyone is joining the call right now so i i was just going to do a quick uh laying of the ground rules and then yeah get
Into it how does that sound yeah it sounds great okay very good so welcome everybody good evening depending on what part of the world you’re in or good morning like shannon and i i assume in and around the gold coast uh australia so um thank you for joining us uh for this session from griffith uh from griffith university and just some ground rules my name is
Chris nolan i’m one of the owners and at oztrack and i’m the director of recruitment and outreach for us and so we’re going to have to be a little rigid in terms of the 15-minute window because there are sessions immediately after and in fairness to everyone we need to respect the schedule there will be an opportunity to ask questions uh towards the end and if
All the all the questions inevitably don’t get answered uh we’re definitely gonna be available our admissions team in the austrack booth as well uh with career echo as well as uh several um representatives from griffith university are going to be in their booth and we can get your questions answered so without further ado shannon i’ll pass it over to you thank
You um and um i just would like to share my screen if that’s okay host disable participant screen sharing is it possible to do that uh chris uh there we go here thanks we can see that shannon yeah you can see that um and you can see that clearly just the screen there or you can see everything yes yes we can see okay great all right well thank you for asking
Me to have a chat today i will introduce myself in a just a few moments before i start as customary with the university and my own cultural obligations uh i would like to acknowledge the um the you can bear peoples uh on the country that i am speaking from today and i’d like to acknowledge their elders past present and emerging i would also like to at this
Point acknowledge the responsibility of their custodianship and they haven’t relinquished their responsibility for looking after the country in which we walk on today i would also like to acknowledge all of you and all your families and your connections that you have and pay my respects to your ancestors and your stories because we shouldn’t leave our stories
Of who we are at the door because it’s what enriches humanity and it also what enriches our our education as well um so thank you again for um allowing me to have this conversation with you today uh a little bit of background about myself um so i am an aboriginal man um from north queensland in a place called makai and i originally went through school to become
An aboriginal health worker more so to play football actually to play rugby league and then i finished my three-year aboriginal health worker course and then went on to do medicine after that i’m situated on the gold coast on you can bear land and by background i’m a general practitioner so i’m a fellow with the royal australian college of gps and working also
As a gp in a remote aboriginal medical center called charlemagne i’m also recently starting to do telemedicine to maintain my connection with that place and practice there as well today i wanted to talk um about three main things the first thing is the context of first people’s health education in the medical curriculum both here nationally and internationally
Look at some of the challenges and changes that we’ve seen with delivering first people’s health curriculum over over a long period of time which i’ve been involved in this area and how we’ve adapted and how we’re going to change that at griffith university to provide excuse me a premium first nations health product for 2021 and beyond uh so a little bit about the
Context um in 2015 i traveled to canada um to canada um on a conference and it was a it was a conference where we were hopped on a bus and we moved from community community and this particular conference stopped at um from sudbury on our way to um seoul saint marie and there’s a little town called spanish and here we sat and spoke with one of the elders of that
Place and they talked about their stories of being removed from country and being removed from their families and this was in 2015 when at that time under the the trudeau government i don’t know who’s in power at the moment um were the truth and reconciliation um commission were doing their delivery of their report and it was it was a real eye-opener to myself
How similar our histories in terms of the first people’s health of canada and those of my own were so similar in what we experience in terms of colonization and also to add so the truth then um the the reckon oh sorry just get the little laser going here um the the commission released their findings in 2015. we had a similar report that was released in 1997 so
We were we were some way ahead of what was happening in canada so that’s just some of the the social context around um around that um also i wanted to acknowledge our um other connections that i have so i’m part of prydock which is hosted by the indigenous physicians association of canada and i’ve had a lot to do with barry levally some of you may know of him
And also um old tiora through tiara which is the new zealand maori association and the association of the american indian physicians and um i’m recently the past vice president of the australian indigenous doctors association uh and we’ve also had um meetings with the medical association of the indigenous people of taiwan so that just gives you an international
Perspective of of some of the circles that we’ve walked in in the past in terms of providing further context around medical education there are standards set by the medical profession both here in australia and also in canada which really outlined what the medical profession has to do in developing the doctors for the future we’ve had standards since 2006 when
I was in canada in 2015 that a lot of the standards spoke more about social accountability rather than those those factors around first people’s health in particular to give you a little bit of a little further context in the early days of implementing indigenous health curriculum it was really difficult um to get indigenous ways of knowing and being into the
Actual um the ways of teaching medical education so which is really predominantly a biomedical sort of model um so we had made lots of mistakes both here and internationally about reinforcing a lot of stereotypes about indigenous people um and that’s because we had no leadership um within the institutions so often the content was more around disease prevalence and
Insolence it was very deficit focused and disease focused it had some really narrow perspectives around the social terms of health we looked at cultural difference and we also looked at research was really done on indigenous people rather than with indigenous people in terms of the cons the institutional context it was often taught by non-indigenous people often
Indigenous people were bought in as guest speakers and were really burnt out about that and then we we took people on immersions which was really more a tourism type experience so we made sort of lots of mistakes in the past and as a medical student i was sort of um was to bear witness of some of these mistakes um what we tried to do with people like um dr
Chelsea bond who’s an academic and a forward thinker was really to to try and flip this narrative on its head um and the solution about um to racism is not about cultural awareness and about teaching people about indigenous cultures it’s really looking at critical race theory and developing a consciousness around that so in order to be an effective contributor
Or to make better doctors um medical education institutions we had to engage in a decolonization process and we had to address racism and privilege at a curricula in both institutional sort of level so some of the concepts that make a good first people’s health curriculum in 2020 we have to have the social and cultural determinants of health we must talk about
That you know we often talk about housing education employment and those sorts of things but what does it mean to have a strength-based culture in terms of assisting people get both better lives for themselves and for their families uh we have to have a strength-based approach so what’s doing well in people’s lives and how do we develop those sorts of things with
Culture at the center we must challenge the the deficit narratives about aboriginal people and indigenous peoples um so what challenged what people thought they knew about aboriginal transgender peoples in the australian context but also in the indigenous context elsewhere and we have to have a sophisticated sophisticated understanding about how racism works and
Operates to maintain the powers and the resources and the health inequities that we see across australia but also abroad we also need to see some of the learning that we offer as transformative to being better human beings so this will not only make you better health professionals but also you’ll be able to advocate in whatever scenes that you walk in whatever
Realities you want we have to have leadership advocacy and also effective effect change uh what we can see is here is the continuum of learning um in in medical school we start with cultural awareness so understanding the difference understanding how our cultures influence the way we see and interpret our realities we have to understand the cultural determinants
Of health we have to look at racism and the way it operates particularly institutional levels to marginalize people and access to healthcare and we actually also have to acknowledge social emotional well-being and this is from the australian context that we have a lot to value we have a lot of value adding concepts around health and well-being for the medical
Profession and hopefully that will make us culturally safe and develo culturally safe institutions and also develop institutional changes where aboriginal people or indigenous people are more likely to get an investigation when they present to medical services so hopefully if those of you that will study at griffith university in year one we’ll take people from
Cultural awareness look at some of the historical influences and we’ll also look at the influences and similarities across around the world uh look at the political social and determinants of health and actually apply that and then we will look at principles to work with and for indigenous peoples in year two we’ll look more critically around racism and look more
About developing research principles to work with indigenous peoples and developing culturally safe systems in year three and four we look at application to practice so this is the the aboriginal medical center that i work at at charleville it’s an aboriginal community control community run organization we have quite innovative ways of delivering healthcare this is
An ophthalmology van with an ophthalmologist delivering cataracts surgery in the back of a semi-trailer this is the center here it’s quite a hot place and it’s very isolated it’s what we call a comprehensive primary health care system and it’s owned and governed by indigenous people this is the last slide so just to give people context about the bigger picture
Of things leadership is really important for transformative change partnerships with indigenous communities we’re trying to think about who we’re recruiting in terms of making better doctors and better health services for all curriculum and assessment is only one aspect advocacy advocacy is very important and we hope that the transformative change through the
Education opportunities that we give through teaching people about racism that they can they can be better advocates to collaborate also with marginalized populations everywhere and we also want to celebrate the successes um so that wraps it up and i’m happy to take questions and hopefully i was on time excellent timing shannon absolutely just for the record yeah
Please um any questions we’ve got a couple of minutes um certainly um uh we’ll be available at the all track booth and uh justine hi justine uh good evening uh justine is the canadian based regional uh marketing manager for griffith international and she’s based in guelph and is a wealth of information on all their programs so i assume justine will be available
At the griffith booth as well so please use the chat i’ve got a couple questions um asides from medical education what do you say are the issues that should be addressed in the addition to self-care so we’ve got a question here from eric aside from medical education what would you say the issues that should be addressed in indigenous healthcare in australia so
Eric one of the biggest things that we need to do is trying to improve access to health care so if you’re an aboriginal person and you present to an emergency department regardless of where it is in australia if you identify as being aboriginal and or torres strait islander in well indigenous in this context you’re less likely to get a diagnostic investigation
Or or treatment even though you’ve got eight times the burden of disease so what we’re trying to do is how do we how do we improve systems that take better care of indigenous peoples and that’s really bang for buck i i would think there are lots of other things well thank you shannon um that was fantastic the similarities um uh with with the management of first
Nations uh healthcare similarities are are many between our countries as you pointed out and uh it’s a big reason um why the australian medical schools are certainly appealing to uh to canadian students so thank you that was fantastic thanks everyone yeah joining look forward to it thanks chris cheers thanks justin
Transcribed from video
Studying Medicine at Griffith University: First Peoples' Healthcare By OzTREKK educational services
