CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses police brutality, suicide and racism.
A report based on data from Queensland Health has found that the state won’t meet its 2031 deadline to close the gap on First Nations life expectancies.
Per ABC News, the report found that First Nations patients were nearly three times more likely than other patients to be discharged from hospitals against medical advice, and two times more likely to miss or delay specialist appointments because of travel costs.
Unsurprisingly, First Nations patients in remote areas were also found to be affected by preventable hospitalisations at higher rates.
The Queensland Audit Office slammed most health equity strategies developed by hospitals and health services as having targets that were too “broad and ambitious”, without “enough details to explain how the objectives will be achieved”.
“First Nations people are still over-represented in measures that indicate a lack of appropriate care, and providing health care to people in remote communities is an ongoing challenge,” the office said.
It suggested health services recruit Indigenous liaison officers and make travel accessible, among other recommendations, in order to close the gap.
Professor Gracelyn Smallwood, a veteran Indigenous activist and former First Nations adviser to Queensland Police Service (QPS), said the findings were unacceptable but perhaps not surprising given the horrendous stories of racism she’s heard.
“We’ve still got First Nations peoples, not just in Queensland, but around Australia, that are dying from purely preventable diseases … it’s totally unacceptable,” she said, per ABC News.
“Almost every week, I’ve got people ringing me about the lack of respect, the lack of services provided to rural and remote communities in particular.”
She said that while it’s true hospitals need to “triple” their First Nations staff, Indigenous liaison officers are “burning out”.
“All of that racism, paternalism and lack of understanding of the real unresolved trauma amongst our people, that’s why people are missing services.”
The report comes off the back of several distressing stories of trauma and violence towards Indigenous people in Queensland.
Guardian Australia recently revealed in an exclusive report that Queensland Police threatened to raid a First Nations rehab camp designed to help children with complex needs heal from the justice system and get out of the crime cycle.
QPS arrested a 12-year-old First Nations boy and removed him from his healing process in the camp against all youth advocate advice, which led to the boy attempting suicide. Despite this, QPS then targeted him the following year and arrested him on an old charge when he was relocated to a new community to escape his past and heal.
The story is one of many the publication has reported about police targeting Indigenous youth and exacerbating their trauma.
In October last year, Queensland police tasered an Aboriginal teenage girl who had Cerebral Palsy after she refused to be interviewed alone about allegations that she was being abused at home. The child’s mother said she had limited use of her arms and legs due to her condition, and that there were plenty of ways police could have responded to her resistance that didn’t involve violence or tasering her. She was hospitalised due to the incident.
In 2018, another audit found high levels of institutionalised racism plaguing the Queensland health system, which, again, is not a surprise.
Pair this with the fact that Indigenous deaths in custody are at a record high (and our Federal Government is yet to implement the recommendations of the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody), suicide rates in young First Nations people are more than twice as high as other people, and rates of Indigenous child removal have actually increased since the national apology, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that there’s a widespread, pervasive hostility towards First Nations people that is deeply embedded in the colonisation of this land and that is still upheld today.
Generational trauma is real, and it’ll take more than just reviewing the health system to close the gap in First Nation people’s health outcomes.
It needs to involve tackling institutionalised racism at every level — in schools, in the justice system, in terms of eliminating homelessness and poverty, in terms of making health services accessible and free, making hospitals safe, food affordable — the list goes on.
Until those barriers are dismantled and good faith is established, like Professor Smallwood said, people will have no reason to trust the services available to them or the government that’s offering them.
If you’re feeling affected by this content, help is available. There’s no shame in talking about it.
- If you’re in distress, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online.
- You can also get in touch with Headspace Yarn Safe online.
- Or you can speak with your NACCHO community health service – find your local member online.
