The Diabetes WA team report back on a trip to the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, where they offered mentoring and support to the community members they trained last year to deliver our DESY program.
“In June, Aboriginal diabetes educator Kathy Huet, Aboriginal health coordinator Sarah Kickett and diabetes educator Nyaree Lawler returned to the NG lands to continue mentoring community members we’d met nine months earlier, who were now sharing knowledge about diabetes within the community.
The Ngaanyatjarra Lands are in the central desert region of Western Australia, so it was a long journey by plane to get there, flying from Perth to Leonora, stopping to refuel, and then continuing to Warburton.
It always takes a bit of time to build trust, and there’s a language barrier to consider. The predominant language spoken is Ngaanyatjarra, though in some places people speak Western Desert dialects of Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi as well as English, so one of our central questions is how to best get the content across.
A key question is how participants will take the information into the community going forward.
It was much colder this time around – only two or three degrees at night. We thought we’d have about ten people, but a lot more community members turned up than we were expecting. We were happy to accommodate this, but we did have to modify our delivery to incorporate everyone.
For much of the time we focussed on mentoring and offering support in delivering Diabetes Education and Self-Management Yarning (DESY), both to people we’d trained in the past and new people wanting to be trained.
A key question is how participants will take the information into the community going forward. We cover things like finding support people, what might stop them from getting the information out, and what solutions they could come up with.
One of the barriers to sharing information about diabetes is the shame factor. People might also feel that getting diabetes is inevitable if a family member has it, and this can create some resistance to thinking about it. Plus, it’s a small community and people don’t necessarily want to be talking about their health issues in front of lots of people.
One solution we came up with to get people talking was starting small – for example talking to your family, and then your wider family. It’s never about shoving the information down people’s throats, but about starting a conversation.
Claire, the Integrated Chronic Disease Care Coordinator from the NG Health Clinic, was in and out throughout the program. We also worked with Carol, the Chronic Disease Nurse, who identified potential community members to attend and handled all the logistics such as travel, catering and the venue.
One idea the participants came up with for sharing information was to organise a bush trip. The plan was to get people along to talk about healthy bush food such as kangaroo, goanna and witchetty grubs, gather some bush food and do a session out there, with Clare coming along to answer any medical questions. We talked about how they could go about planning the trip, organising transport and food, spreading the word by putting up signs at the local sports centre and so on, and what barriers might need to be overcome.
On the second last day, one of the women suggested going for a walk after lunch because we’d been talking about how exercising after food can stop your blood glucose from climbing too high. She got almost everyone walking, which was great to see.
It felt good on the last day – it was so easy, everyone was opening up, talking more and sharing stories and ideas. They were looking forward to the trip out bush and thinking about where it would take place and how it might happen. It was like they took ownership – something just clicked and the room felt calmer and lighter.”
Find out more about the work of our Aboriginal health team, including our Facebook community, education programs and services.
