Family, Community and Disability

Background: Community development plays an important role in increasing the access of disadvantaged groups to resources and services. We examined how community development in primary healthcare services may improve patient safety by involving people in activities that lead to their enhanced use of services.  Methods: Audits of ser ....

The Community Quality Use of Medicines (QUM) program is a model of engagement used to empower communities in various parts of Australia with respect to their consumer needs and expectations about the quality use of medicines. The CHF Community QUM Project was developed through partnerships between the Consumers' Health Forum of Aus ....

Assesses the likely social, human, financial and economic implications of the proposals in the 'Guide to the proposed [Murray-Darling] Basin Plan' on local communities across the Basin's 19 regions. The primary objective was to understand the impacts on local, small-scale, human issues and costs during the short and medium term. Report Location ....

Leadership is the driving force behind development and the channel through which the characteristics to improve community capacity flow. Community agents are the mechanisms through which community actions are performed and through which development subsequently occurs. This paper discusses the role of community agents and their imp ....

In 2000, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia was awarded a grant by the Australian Research Council under its Learned Academies Special Projects Scheme to carry out research on 'The Sustainability of Australian Rural Communities'. Six university-based teams from across Australia convened in Canberra in February 2001 to develop a share ....

Sport is often regarded as an important part of life in rural Australia, contributing to community identity, sense of place, social interaction and good health. The involvement of rural citizens in sport also has the potential to contribute to social capital. Understood in simple terms as norms of reciprocity and associational life, social capita ....

Many rural Australian communities continue to endure a prolonged drought. The mental health effects of short-term natural disaster are well known; those of a long-term and chronic natural disaster such as drought are less well understood. However, in addition to immediate distress there are likely to be feelings of loss, grief and ....

The present study was a qualitative investigation of the impact of drought on rural families of southern New South Wales, Australia, with particular emphasis on the concept of resilience in times of stress. The aim was to provide insight, from a psychological perspective, into the experiences of rural farmers in a time of adversity ....

This paper draws on original research conducted in 2003 with drought affected people and communities in inland NSW The paper outlines the scale of the drought, its social impacts and the resultant need for services. Income support mechanisms aimed at drought affected people and communities such as the Exceptional Services scheme ha ....

Aboriginal people across Australia suffer significant health inequalities compared with the non-Indigenous population. Evidence indicates that inroads can be made to reduce these inequalities by better understanding social and cultural determinants of health, applying holistic notions of health and developing less rigid definitions of wellbeing. ....

Issue addressed: This paper reports on the process evaluation of the Same Sky project which was aimed at developing regional community support programs for same sex attracted youth (SSAY) and their families in four regional sites in Western Australia. A multi-faceted approach modelled on successful urban outreach programs was used ....

This ALTC project is a collaborative endeavour between the four public universities involved in teacher education in Western Australia (Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia), focussed on improving the quality of preparation of pre-service teachers for rural, regional ....

Given the growing urgency of combating poverty in the 21st century, this paper discusses the value of promoting microfinance as a development tool, namely the Grameen Bank model, to engender a more inclusive, participatory and most importantly, sustainable approach to international development. This paper contextualizes the role and val ....

Advances in information technology and telecommunications may offer many potential benefits to Australia's under-served communities [1]. Communication and information technologies can reduce the barriers of distance and space that disadvantage rural areas, where the health status of residents is often worse than that of their urban ....