My name is Beige and I'm a Wongatha Ngadju Mirning woman from Kalgoorlie. I work for the Quitline and I have been here for 5 years now and I work as an Aboriginal counsellor.
When someone contacts Quitline, they will speak to a trained counsellor and then they will get support with making a plan to help with either their smoking or vaping depending on what their goals are.
Quitline make mob feel safe and comfortable when they call Quitline by providing a culturally safe service. So it's really important for the client to feel safe and to have that trusting relationship.
We do that through a yarning style approach. So just yarning one on one and that makes sure that the client feels comfortable so that they're able to get the support that they need.
So what encourages people to contact Quitline is usually their health professional. So an Aboriginal health practitioner, a doctor, nurse, midwife.
So usually they would recommend that the patient call Quitline and get some support with their smoking or baking and it's also a free service.
They also sometimes see advertisements whether it's on a smoking packet whether it's through social media online.
There isn't a typical quitting journey.
I think everyone's journey is definitely different.
Everyone is kind of at different places in their journey with quitting smoking or vaping and everyone has different dependence levels as well.
It's really important that we help them with where they're at rather than treating everyone as the same.
We follow up with mob if they call outside of hours. So, usually we'd like to call them the next day. If they don't answer, usually we'll try and call a few more times to try and get through to them to offer them that support.
If someone needs a break from counselling and wants to have a pause with speaking to a counsellor, they can definitely do that.
So they can either set a call back for say a month or two down the track for a counsellor to give them a call and see if they're ready to have a yarn again.
If not, they're welcome to kind of call in whenever they feel comfortable and then we can pick up and go from there.
If people don't feel comfortable with talking over the phone, there's some other options available.
We do have a Quitline website. They can also text through our WhatsApp or our Facebook.
Otherwise, there's also something called my quit buddy app, which is an app which can help with your journey with quitting smoking or vaping.
I once had a young Aboriginal client call in and we helped them to quit smoking and vaping successfully.
They saw the impact that smoking and vaping had on their community, especially the elders, and they didn't want that for themselves.
So, they called Quitline and we gave them support.
We spoke to them for about 2 months and during that time we helped them with strategies and also helped them to use nicotine replacement therapy so patches and spray.
They were able to quit successfully and now they're living a healthier lifestyle.
So it was really really great.
What I would say to someone who is hesitant about calling Quitline is give us a call anyway and have a yarn.
See how you feel.
There's no pressure for you to make any changes if you're not ready but just having that yarn can sometimes be really really helpful.