AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
TITLE: EHSE07 Chronic Disease
DURATION: 3min18
Web video image, Yolnu woman speaking in language - subtitled
Anne Lowell: My name’s Anne Lowell, I work in the research centre for health and wellbeing at CDU. For the past twenty years I’ve worked mostly in North-East Arnhem Land with Yolnu and in a range of different areas, but the common theme across all of them has been communication. Communication between Balanda and Yolnu either in education, in a range of different areas. What we’re focusing on now is communication in health in terms of encounters between health professionals and consumers but most recently looking at education processes, so how to effectively share information about chronic conditions, which of course are extremely prevalent in that population.
So now we have a partnership with an organization called the Yalu’ Marngithinyaraw which was set up from a research project we did 12 or more years ago and it’s really a centre for cultural education and research. It’s run by Yolnu; there are balanda who help and support, but all the people employed are Yolnu and it’s survived over this time. So we work in partnership with them, so they run the project and we provide support. So most of the funding goes across to the Yalu so they can do most of the work.
Another key feature of the work that we do is it’s always done in preferred language of the people who are involved, whether it’s an education project or whether it’s research and the preferred language almost always is a Yolnu language.
Web video image, Yolnu woman speaking in language – subtitled
So this most recent project we’ve developed sixteen videos around chronic conditions all in YolnuMatha. And the one we’ve just finished on cardiovascular disease, there were some old men we tested it with and they watched it three times over a day, and in the feedback interviews we did afterwards they talked about how the story got into their blood and opened their minds. They were very excited that they had access to this information which they felt they never had access to before.
Web video image, Yolnu woman speaking in language
So the approach with developing these educational resources is to integrate very detailed explanations of the western medical story with Yolnu knowledge and Yolnu experience so the medical story is translated into YolnuMatha, a Yolnu interpreter, then different people will tell their stories which is also very powerful and very important in terms of the resource that Yolnu want. So the resources integrate the knowledge and experience from both domains, from the medical domain and the Yolnu domain.
People talk about participatory research; this is actually a stronger, more collaborative research, there’s a word that Yolnu use – where every person has a key, an essential role but different, and it really means collaborative practice, that’s the kind of model of research work that we do.