Website 'How's your Sugar?' and Aboriginal Healthcare Challenges

This essay delves into the healthcare challenges experienced by Aboriginal Australians, highlighting the historical context of health disparities and government initiatives aimed at improvement. It emphasizes the significance of the 'How's your sugar?' website, developed by the Australian Community Centre for Diabetes (ACCD) at Victoria University, as a peer-to-peer health education platform. The essay discusses the importance of culturally appropriate health education, particularly in managing diabetes, and how the website leverages narrative health information and storytelling to enhance health literacy and promote positive lifestyle changes within the Aboriginal community. The analysis includes the effectiveness of peer-to-peer education and the impact of racism in healthcare. The essay concludes that the 'How's your sugar?' website is a valuable tool and suggests further implementation of similar strategies to improve health outcomes and close the gap in healthcare disparities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Introduction
Prior to the British settlement, around 500 indigenous nations inhibited the Australian
continent. It is one of most ancient cultures as it was developed over 60000 years ago.
However, thousands of aboriginal has lost their lives due to violence or disease. The
remaining was living with poor health status. Various acts have been introduced to protect
their health and well-being including Central Board for the protection of Aborigines, 1860
and Aboriginal Protection act 1886, and others. In order to omit the gap in healthcare, several
initiatives are being taken. The Australian Community Centre for Diabetes (ACCD) located
at Victoria University has developed a website for the people suffering from diabetes. It was
developed by the indigenous people for the sake of indigenous people and the name of the
website is “How’s your sugar?”. The main aim of the website is provide information
discussing how to live well with diabetes. It incorporates information for the indigenous
people about all kind of practicalities of living well even with the diabetic issues. It not just
provides diabetes management information but also ordinary people can discuss their
challenges and successes through this website.
Healthcare and indigenous community
The culture of Australia’s aboriginal as well as Torres Strait Islander is said to be one
of the longest continuing cultures of the world and they are living sustainably for at least
65000 years on the Australian continent. In recent years, aboriginal people are experiencing
inequalities in healthcare compared to other Australians. However, Australian government is
trying to close the gap and improve the condition but, minimal progress has been made in this
regard. In the year 2007, the Council of Australian Government committed $1.57billion on
closing the gap in indigenous health outcomes. The strategy acknowledged the importance of
engagement and positive relationship with the indigenous Australians (health.vic, 2018).

Despite of these strategies, the health of aboriginal Australians is increasingly being
recognized as a social justice issue and improving their health status is becoming a long-
standing challenge for the Australian government. The inequality gap has not been
significantly reduced yet. The health measures show that disease and illness are recorded at
much higher rates among the indigenous communities than non-indigenous communities.
Most importantly, chronic condition such as diabetes is much higher in the people of Torres
Strait Islander. According to the National Aboriginal Health Strategy of the year 1989, health
to aboriginal people is a matter of determining all aspects of their life. The Victorian
Population Health survey revealed the result that racism is a challenge in healthcare and
aboriginal people as well as the people or Torres Strait Islander are more likely to suffer from
the inequalities in healthcare due to racism. Even, the indigenous people also complain of not
receiving equal care from the healthcare professionals who are non-indigenous. Also, the
Australian Bureau of Statistics conducted a general social survey in the year 2014 that found
around 18% of the Victorians experienced discrimination in healthcare which is a key
determinant of health (Treloar et al., 2018).
Importance of peer-to-peer education
Education and self-management is an important component of diabetic care. Effective
diabetes management reduce morbidity and mortality among the indigenous people of
Australia. It has been found in the studies that health education in order to increase the health
literacy among the people is highly necessary. Also, there is evidence that culturally
appropriate health education program led by the aboriginal peers can be effective in
improving self-management practices among aboriginal people (Azzopardi et al., 2018).
Health promotion aimed at aboriginal people is focusing on the web-based environments.
Many aboriginal people access internet and in the 2011 Census it has been found that 63%
aboriginal households use internet connection. In other study on aboriginal people disclosed

the fact that they are using social platforms to establish social relationship and engagement
(Adams, Liebzeit, Browne & Atkinson, 2017). In fact, the peer to peer health education
program is most effective among the aboriginal people as they feel comfortable from
receiving knowledge from their fellow people which makes the health education program
more effective. Also, younger aboriginal people are more likely to use internet and access
different social platform regularly. The website “How’s your sugar?” is constructed to spread
health education and the target group was the indigenous people of Australia. In the videos,
people shared their views about how the health education received from the website helped in
acquiring the new life style which is healthy as well as necessary to manage their diabetes.
The education program discussed the importance of walking, doing exercise and other in
maintain the diabetes which helped the people to gain a better health outcome. The website
was developed and named by the aboriginal people and considering the fact it is indicated in
literatures that it helps in reducing issues regarding identity loss or dislocation feeling of the
aboriginal people while acquiring the knowledge from the website. Therefore, a peer to peer
health education establishes a comfortable pathway for the aboriginal people to increase their
health literacy level and the website “How’s your sugar?” is playing a major role in this
regard.
Conclusion
The paper is focussed on the healthcare challenges of the aboriginal people and the
role of the website “How’s your sugar?” in this purpose. It provided a clear review on the
health state of the aboriginal people including the government initiatives in this purpose.
Finally it can be concluded that the website is helpful and government should implement
more strategies to create such educational website in order to increase the health literacy
among the aboriginal people of Torres Strait Islander.

References
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