Indigenous Health education online

Weblog 3.3

The Indigenous HealthInfoNet is a website that “aims to inform practice and policy in Indigenous health by making research and other knowledge readily accessible.” In this way it makes a contribution to ‘closing the gap’ in Indigenous health. It is developed and maintained by an academic unit of Edith Cowan University (ECU) .

They see themselves as involved in ‘translational research’ a term which is emerging as a integrative description of the processes of translating knowledge into practice and policy (knowledge into action) and based on the Canadian concept of knowledge translation.

The material covers

• around 30 health and health-related topics of relevance to Indigenous health;
• eight population groups (such as women, infants and children, and offenders); and
• Indigenous health by states and territories.

While much of the website is dedicated to government, health professional resources the website has list of health promotion resources according to topic accessible to the community.  I looked at the health promotion resources listed for three topics – diabetes, cardiovascular disease and ear health. Most resources were written resources and use of technology was in the minority. As with most internet resources a proportion of the web links were no longer accessible.

Diabetes (see diagram) as an example had 71 resources listed, of which 16 (22%) were audiovisual, 2 (3%) were designated as electronic source (but did not have active links)  and 1 (1%) was an online multimedia. The remainder were booklets, fact sheets, flipcharts, posters and resource packages. Other topic resources also included comics.

Technology versus print