Nunyara Wellbeing Centre has been successful in their application for funding from the Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health.
It means an injection of more than $300,000 of recurrent funding for Whyalla Aboriginal health, focussing on chronic disease and maternal health through the Healthy for Life program.
“The Healthy for Life program will aim to improve the health of Aboriginal people in Whyalla by making services and programs available in the community that are easy to access and in an environment that feels culturally and socially comfortable,” Nunyara Wellbeing Centre manager Cindy Zbierski said.
The services and programs will help detect when someone has a chronic disease, such as diabetes, or if they are at risk of developing a chronic disease.
“The idea is to assist individuals and their families in trying to fix or stop chronic conditions from getting any worse,” Ms Zbierski said.
Some programs and services will work with pregnant women, babies, mums and dads, children and families to ensure that babies get the best head start to having a healthy life free from, or at lower risk of, chronic disease.
“We will do this by increasing the staffing of the birthing program already in place and provide a female health worker to support pregnant and new mums in having a healthy pregnancy and to help them with breast feeding,” Ms Zbierski said.
Nunyara Wellbeing Centre board of management chairperson Wilhemine Lieberwirth said the centre would hold many specialist clinics to support the Aboriginal community to get healthy and stay healthy.
“Clinics that can provide immunisations, diabetes management, respiratory and asthma management and women’s health care will be the key specialist clinics operating at Nunyara,” Ms Lieberwirth said.
“We will also work with other services to provide programs to help people to manage their conditions better themselves.”
To bring all of these activities and more together, a Healthy for Life coordinator will be employed by Nunyara to implement the services, get them running well and to ensure that we have good information on health and sickness in the Aboriginal community.
For further information about the Healthy for Life program, contact Nunyara Wellbeing Centre on 8649 4366.