Improvement of Health Status of Indigenous Australians in Northern Territory

Running head: HEALTHCARE
HEALTHCARE
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1HEALTHCARE
Improvement of the status of the health of the indigenous population in Australia has
been a long debatable challenge for the government of Australia. The gap that exist among the
indigenous and the non-indigenous people in Australia has been one of the factor that has
remained unacceptable in a wide basis (Biddle 2017). This factor has been recognized and
identified as one of the concern related to major violation of the human rights by the committees
of United Nation and has been thoroughly acknowledged by the government of Australia. The
thesis statement of the essay argues with the fact of the inquiry regarding the using status of the
Ingenious Australians residing in the Northern Territory and the relevant social determinants of
the health that the government should consider while providing effective recommendation for the
improvement of the policy.
Background
Social determinants theory highlights that the inequality and the health of the population
is generally determined by many of the interconnected factors of the society. It has been one of
the basic tenet of the law of the human rights that all the rights are interconnected and tends to
effect over the enjoyment of the other population.
The choice of the housing that has been available to the indigenous Australians tends to
be more constrained as compared to other non-indigenous Australians on the basis of some of the
factors like high rate of unemployment, lower rate of wages, lower dimensions related to the
budgetary proficient and non-accessible home proprietorship (Humanrights.gov.au. 2019).
The northern territory has been significantly overrepresented in the homelessness
statistics that represents more than 12 percent of the national homeless population irrespective of
being less than one percent of the population of the Australia. According to Slhd.nsw.gov.au.

2HEALTHCARE
(2016) 21% of the indigenous population residing in the Northern Territory are reported to be
homeless. Among these population, majority of the indigenous people resides in the remote
communities in overcrowded houses which lack the basic necessities. These people are homeless
people of Australia. Furthermore as per the reports, the indigenous population lives outside the
urban territories among which 19% of Ace springs, 9% of Darwin and 28% of Katherine has
distinguished their community from the time of 2011 enumeration (Humanrights.gov.au. 2019).
These community of people residing in the Northern Territory of Australia lacks their basic
opportunity for accessing to the natural assets and control their own lives for a healthy living and
existence.
Social determinants of health (SDOH)
The social determinants of health is the condition where people grow, work, love and
age. These factors are basically the circumstances that are shaped by the power distribution and
the resources at the national and the global level. According to the research by Christensen et al.
(2016) there lies a very close connection among the social and the economic status of the
indigenous population to their status of the health. It has been furthermore estimated that
differences towards the access towards the social determines of the health among the indigenous
and the non-indigenous population of Australia explain one third and one half of the gap in the
rate of the mortality.
According to the research studies, living in poor, unsafe and degrading quality together
with unsecure housing is generally associated with the poor health status of an individual
(Spinney, et al. 2016). The factor of stress related to the overcrowding, the challenges towards

3HEALTHCARE
accessing the housing and the lack of the affordability of the housing tends to adversely impact
on the health (Markham and Doran 2015).
One of the major reason behind the poor condition of the housing of the indigenous
population of the Australia are the inappropriate design towards the cultural practices and the
local climatic conditions (Lea and Torzillo 2016). Furthermore low quality constriction and the
limited rate of maintenance are some of the other factors towards the homelessness of the
majority of the indigenous Australian residing in the Northern Territory. The factors such as the
wellbeing and other prosperity are just not an individual issues but the challenges for the entire
society.
Source: (Ware 2013)
The figure above illustrates the ratios of the health related challenges among the
indigenous population due to poor housing and homelessness among the Northern Territory of
Australia. The figure highlights how the factor of housing is one of the key social determinants