Gari and You: Development of an Interactive Alcohol Education Flipchart for a Remote Indigenous Community

The 'Gari and You' interactive flipchart was developed to guide allied health workers who were counselling patients in a remote Indigenous community about alcohol abuse. 'Gari' is a widely-used word for the term alcohol in the West Pilbara region, Western Australia. Community leaders and others contributed to the design, content and artwork of the flipchart, a component of a larger health promotion project to reduce alcohol consumption. The interactive flipchart prompts self-reflective responses from a patient in a counselling encounter through the true story of a local man known to have successfully changed his lifestyle of alcohol abuse. As a means of strengthening support from personal networks, a brochure helps the client to nominate people to help the client achieve a goal of a gari-free day.