I have been active in advocacy for improved rural health services in Australia, at a national and state level since 1994.

A group of 170 of us formed an organisation we called Services for Australian Rural and Remote Allied Health (SARRAH) in 1995. SARRAH holds a bienniel conference and, on the other year, visits Commonwealth Parliamentarians at Parliament House in Canberra

I was the SARRAH representative to the Queensland Health Minister’s Rural Health Advisory Council from 1996 – 2001. I was the co-convenor of the SARRAH National Conference in Cairns from 1999 – 2001. It was a very successful conference. At that conference SARRAH came more prominently to the attention of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health and now runs a couple of scholarship schemes for them – one for postgraduate rural allied health workers, and one for undergraduate allied health students from rural backgrounds. From the outcomes of that conference I helped develop a forum for Community Based Rehabilitation and have moderated the email discussion list. The list is open to any professionals anywhere in the world with an interest in CBR.  Working in a rural town and spending much of one’s spare time with NGO work, keeping up to date with clinical information can be tricky. The IT age has vastly improved access to information for rural practitioners. Here are some sources I use: Qld Injury Surveillance Unit reports; Rural Health Education Foundation podcasts .

I was the president of SARRAH from 2003-2005.

The National Rural Health Alliance is a peak body consisting of 28 national organisations with rural health interests. I served on the board of the NRHA. National Rural Health Alliance from 2005 to 2009.

The 9th National Rural Health Conference was held in Albury, NSW over 7 – 10 March 2007. It was a great conference with a strong analysis of Australian rural health from ground to policy, and included a fabulous arts stream all from artists based in Albury. I joined the conference choir of about 30 men and women and we sang for the close of the conference. I was pleased to meet Tim Metcalf, a passionate doctor-poet, with whom I had correspondence leading up to the conference. My poem about the conference is on the poetry page. One of the key themes of the conference was ‘community resilience’. Hegney et al presented a model of individual resilience that included : perserverance (internal toughness), adaptability (individual capacity and skills), social support (community capacity, belonging in community and family), hope (future visions), spirituality (external faith), connectivity to the environment (belonging in place). See a summary here

In June 2007, the Wilde Report into child abuse in Northern Territory Indigenous communities was released. This prompted the Australian Government to enact an emergency response. The NRHA has responded to that emergency response with tacit support in expectation of a more purposeful medium and long term follow-up of the recommendations of that report. The NRHA media releases on this can be found on the website. In the background of these media releases is a marked nervousness that, in six months time, governmental responses to Indigenous community development will go on the backburner once again. Both major federal political parties have promised this will not be the case. So I guess we will be trying to hold them to that promise.

In August 2007, both SARRAH and the NRHA have had major meetings in Canberra, and visited Parliamentarians of the Commonwealth Government. See Flickr, search rural health, sarrah summit, nrha councilfest. We were received positively. The federal elections are coming up in the next few months. Federal budget is in surplus. The health system is entering a phase of crisis with an ageing population.

In November 2007, the federal election was held, which lead to a change in government.  The new Health Minister was Nicola Roxon. The Board of the NRHA met with Minister Roxon on Monday 17th March 2008 for one hour. It was a convivial meeting with a sense of a meeting of minds over the direction of rural health. All is not well in the financial world in this first quarter of 2008 so the new government has its budget in a holding – slashing pattern. So everyone is sitting tight for now.

The SARRAH biennial conference was held over 27th – 30th 2008 in Yeppoon, near Rockhampton, Qld. In a surprise move, I was given the Squawk award.

Squawk Award

The Squawk is so named because the SARRAH logo is the cockatoo, and is given for talking up rural allied health services (squawking). I helped facilitate a pre-conference workshop on Community Based Rehabilitation.

The latter of 2008 and so far into 2009 (writing in March) has been hectic in the rural health movement as the Commonwealth Government applies itself to a number of important reviews: National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, National Preventative Health Strategic Taskforce, Primary Healthcare Strategy.

I was appointed by the NRHA Board as the Convenor of the 10th National Rural Health Conference that was held in Cairns in May 2009. It was a strong conference of 950 delegates who delivered a set of recommendations to the Federal Health Minister who addressed the conference on the final day.

In July 2009 I retired from my posts on SARRAH and NRHA boards.