Consultation Updates - Cairns

Summary of the NATSIHP consultation in Cairns

The consultations for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan (the Health Plan) are currently underway. This page will be updated with the latest news and highlights from the consultations as they progress.

Cairns

The community consultation in Cairns was held on Wednesday 5 December 2012. Fifty-one community members and other representatives, including participants from Cape York, attended the consultation. The Minister for Indigenous Health, the Hon Warren Snowdon MP also attended the consultation. The emerging key themes from the consultation included the importance of creating services around the family model of care, recognising community controlled services as effective primary health care providers, the need for cultural embedding programs to preserve cultural identity, the importance of sexual and reproductive education to support young people to make informed decisions, sustainable funding that is flexible to meet the needs of the community, the importance of attracting and retaining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people to the health workforce, the need for spiritual and cultural checks in addition health checks, the importance of providing culturally sensitive palliative care and a lack of awareness of the barriers that kinship and gender can create to services, particularly in remote communities.