“If you can’t feel Country beneath your feet, something’s wrong”: Foot Stomp in Southern Adelaide
Duncan Langford-Glass1, Shane D’Angelo1, Saraid Martin2, Tamara Mackean11Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia2Southern Adelaide Local Health Network, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia
Abstract
In Southern Adelaide there are no public podiatry services specifically for Aboriginal people, and anecdotally, mainstream tertiary pathways for consumers with serious foot concerns have had limited Aboriginal referrals. In this project, we engaged Aboriginal community members to better understand how to strengthen foot care services. Our aims were:
1. To undertake yarning circles with Aboriginal consumers and community to understand needs, experiences and priorities for foot care service delivery.
2. To conduct Aboriginal Patient Journey Mapping (APJM) to determine how foot care delivery reflects community needs, experiences, and priorities.
We found three main narratives about foot health and foot care.
1) Feet & foot care – there is knowledge about foot problems; foot care tools; need for podiatric care and these are juggled in terms of finite resources and competing priorities.
2) Experiences of foot care with health professionals and services are mixed. Good experiences involved taking time, explaining procedures and ongoing positive relationships, and flawed experiences involved fear, pain and having to accept culturally unsafe service.
3) Service provision and access – access was enabled when patients felt safe, gender protocols observed, transport provided, and where community vouched for providers and services. Barriers to access included miscommunication at multiple levels; a lack of Aboriginal worker continuity; and inadequate handover of patients across services.
Our project showed that Aboriginal people do care about their feet; different concepts of feet can be strength-based; and there are some respectful and quality podiatry services which can be built on in Southern Adelaide.
Biography
Duncan Langford-Glass is a Kamilaroi man of the plains of NSW. He has a Bachelor of Social Work and has worked within government and non-government areas including social and mental health, child protection and Indigenous health. Duncan is a Research Fellow in the College of Medicine & Public Health, Flinders University
Saraid Martin is an Endorsed for Medicines Podiatrist with 15 years experience. Her clinical interest areas are the high risk foot and Indigenous health. Saraid is a Masters by Research candidate at the University of South Australia and is the SA Co-ordinator – Aboriginal diabetes foot complications program, SAHMRI