Indigenous Population in Australia

Running head: HEALTHCARE
Healthcare
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1HEALTHCARE
Introduction
The indigenous population in Australia refers to the Aboriginal and Torres islander
population who are the descended of the groups that used to reside in Australia and the
surrounding islands before the British colonization took place. As per Accattoli, Guerrieri and
Leberle, (2019), the indigenous population that is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander
community currently represent approximately 3.3 percent of the total Australian population.
While the Australian healthcare service has got developed a lot over decades, the indigenous
community is still backward when it come to effective access to the healthcare service. Lack of
educational facilities, low employment rate, poverty, high drug, and alcohol abuse rate,
miscommunication due to different cultural background, superstitions and lack of effective
approach to reach the indigenous community can be pointed out some of the chief reasons
behind high healthcare issues and mortality rates amongst Aboriginal and Torres Islander
community. In this report, a detailed need assessment of the indigenous community, potential
challenges associated with it and SWOT analysis of the program designed for addressing the
needs have been conducted. Additionally, brief discussion about the program priorities for
ensuring its success has also been conducted in this report.
Discussion
Need assessment of the indigenous community
In this section four different types of needs of the indigenous community, that is the normative
needs, felt needs, expressed needs and Comparative needs has been assessed. According to
Parkinson and Jones (2019), expert guidance on quality requirements, necessary service levels
and what constitutes an adequate degree of wellbeing for a population determines normative

2HEALTHCARE
need. One of the highly used normative assessment techniques used in healthcare includes health
screening. In order to access the health condition of the community, healthcare screening can be
considered as an effective technique. This will help the researchers to identify major heath issues
faced by the indigenous community. According to Altman and Daly (2018), for analyzing the felt
and expressed needs of indigenous community, it is highly crucial to communicate with them
and observe their life style and issues associated with it. According to rwav.com.au (2020),
cconducting consultation with the Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations can be
considered to be an effective way of understanding the needs and community.
Another optional method of need assessment includes conducting desktop search to
source the publicly available information. However, as per my opinion, using a mixed
methodology, that is undertaking secondary research for identifying geographic priority areas
that is areas with the prevalence of heath issues in the community should be followed by
consultation through campaigns. According to nsw.gov.au. (2015) interviewing through
development of questionnaire can be considered as one of the most effective need assessment
tools for Aboriginal and Torres islander community. While survey has been suggested by Pollack
(2018), as per my opinion, conducting face to face interview with the community members can
help us to detect the specific health care needs of the community members. Not only this, open
ended interviews will help us to develop an understanding of their perspective as well as opinion
about modern healthcare system. In order to analyze comparative needs, conducting interview
with the government and non government organizations who have already worked with the
community and conducting, along with conducting interview with the community members,
needs to be conducted.