Indigenous Health And Wellbeing Essay

Topic 1: Indigenous Health and Wellbeing

Health and wellbeing are key aspects for every child including Indigenous children and it influences Indigenous children’s learning, development and physical health. There is one core factor that contributes to Indigenous children’s health and wellbeing. For instance, low socio economic status is one of the main issues that associated with poor health of Indigenous families (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013) because the family may not have enough currency to spend on healthy food, which brings a lack of nutrition to Indigenous students. As the lecturer, Linda Bonney (Lecture, 2017) indicated that Aboriginal children in Australia aged less than four years experience malnutrition at 29.6 times the rate for non-Aboriginal children. Likewise, Indigenous

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children have the highest prevalence of Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media (CSOM) in the world, which is a chronic infection of the middle ear caused by bacterial and viral pathogens (Lecture, 2017). The Lecturer (2017) also mentioned that FASD is a disorder affected when unborn babies are exposed to alcohol in the womb which they will have problem with cognitive abilities such as planning, language skills, reading, gross motor skills and memory. The data from the Western Australian Birth Defects Registry showed that 0.02 per 1000 births for non-Indigenous children in the FASD condition, whereas 2.76 per 1000 births for Indigenous children which was a large difference (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2015). It also causes Indigenous children with varying degrees of hearing loss. Although Aboriginal children have a good eye health, but educators still need to pay attention on the early detection of trachoma to exclude the