Aboriginal-led COVID-19 response in Western NSW takes out the Inspiring Team award

A/Executive director Aboriginal Health and wellbeing, Donna Stanley, said they were proud of what they achieved during the height of the pandemic.

"We got a call to action here in Dubbo because there had been a significant rise in Aboriginal people who had tested positive to COVID," she said.

"Initially we were on the hop a bit, we had prepared a bit but it wasn't really what was needed for what was happening in the community here in Dubbo."

Fear around what would happen if COVID got into large places like Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett, where there are large Aboriginal populations and people with quite complex chronic illness, was real.

"We were trying to figure out what was needed," she said.

Ms Stanley worked with Tom Douglass as the two leads on the COVID response, and they were helped by a team of Aboriginal support officers.

For every Aboriginal person who tested positive for COVID they were allocated an Aboriginal Support officer who would make daily contact with those individuals, as well as their families.

"Often Aboriginal households are larger, in one of our households there were 15 people in one house, so you can imagine the implications of trying to socially distance," she said.

"We were seeing 100 per cent strike rate with the whole house testing positive within a few days or a week so our Aboriginal Support Officer would make contact daily and look at things like food security and making sure they had groceries."

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Food hubs were established across communities within the Western LGA's where food security was managed.

"If people had symptoms we could refer them into the COVID care community team, who we worked very closely with, if someone was presenting a symptom they would be more likely to tell our Aboriginal staff then a strange and unknown number that was ringing them," she said.

"Our guys became the conduit for connecting people into the right care, if people had symptoms we could get that clinical team involved."

To make sure the team had a human element to it, they tried to go above and beyond for their community.

That included buying birthday cakes for children when they realised the kids wouldn't be able to celebrate with their friends.

"They are the simple things but for families who were in lockdown for quite a while it was a struggle so we tried to think about their mental health and wellbeing," she said.

Staff members were also trained to do vaccinations, so they worked with Aspen Pharmacare Australia to take a van out to rural areas to get residents vaccinated.

"We went around apartment blocks and we would park in the car park and we would invite people down to be tested for vaccination but also go door to door to do a health and wellbeing assessment on each household or unit to really identify what we really needed to be in front of," she said.

"If there were people who couldn't get out to those clinics we would actually go door to door and worked in with our Aboriginal medical services who would give us a list and nominate people who needed the vaccination and so we would work in with them to facilitate that."

Dubbo was, unfortunately, the first community in Australia to lose an Aboriginal person to COVID, which made everyone see the reality of the virus.

"With the support our guys were provided they were able to give some comfort to those families that did lose loved ones and the appreciation shown to us from those families was appreciated," she said.

"The arrangements around funerals for sorry business... usually that's a time when Aboriginal families come together and we couldn't do that, so we did things like getting exemptions for some families so they could have a few more then the 10 prescribed at the time.

"We also talked to the funeral home to organise if they could drive past the residents so if people in the family who were positive could at least come to the fence and be present in some capacity, and families were so grateful for that to be supported."

Ms Stanley said the public health order was confronting for a lot of people and they made it their mission to make the best out of an ordinary situation.

"It was tough to be isolated, so we made sure people could enjoy some comforts they usually did in their own space...being told you have to stay in this place and you can't come in and out is pretty tough," she said.

Ms Stanley said working together with other services was a "strong demonstration" of how things could change if people work together to get outcomes for people.

"Our model we used here was taken right across Australia, we were the first space where there was a major impact for the Aboriginal community and other communities and districts learnt from us, so we led the COVID response," she said.

"We are pretty proud of it."

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