INDIGENOUS HEALTH

Indigenous Health

Indigenous Health

Introduction

The topic that was assigned to me was health care. Funding for indigenous health care fairly had come to my immediate attention. The reason being is because when I was attending high school in England some 5 years back, my teachers told me that indigenous people have the worst health of any identifiable group in UK, they carry a burden of poor health and mortality far in excess of that expected from the proportion they comprise of the total British population. (Devanesen, 2007, 22)

In addition, they are left out in the society because the government gives them lands in some remote areas which have relatively poor access to health care. And I heard that this is still a hot issue within UK when I went to Canada and back to Hong Kong. For the sake of this assignment, apart from gathering information from books and journals, I also had asked a social worker in a hospital about the facts and the status of this issue. (Devanesen, 2007, 22)

Indigenous Health Care

The world's almost 400 million Indigenous people have low standards of health. This poor health is associated with poverty, malnutrition, overcrowding, poor hygiene, environmental contamination, and prevalent infections. Inadequate clinical care and health promotion, and poor disease prevention services aggravate this situation. Some Indigenous groups, as they move from traditional to transitional and modern lifestyles, are rapidly acquiring lifestyle diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes, and physical, social, and mental disorders linked to misuse of alcohol and of other drugs. Correction of these inequities needs increased awareness, political commitment, (Mooney, 2006, 564) and recognition rather than governmental denial and neglect of these serious and complex problems. Indigenous people should be encouraged, trained, and enabled to become increasingly involved in overcoming these challenges.

Against this background, a report was created by the National Health and Medical Research Council. One of the key findings of this report was that all the expenditure ratios of indigenous to non-indigenous were lower than had previously been assumed. For all services and all sources of funds, recurrent expenditures for indigenous people were estimated at $853 million. This was 2.19% of all recurrent health expenditure in 1995/96. The total spending for indigenous people was only $2320. It also revealed that the pattern of service use by indigenous people is different from other British. The former rely much more heavily on publicly provided hospital and community health services and spend much less on private doctors, private hospital care, dentistry, medicines and ancillary services. It is believed that cultural differences, isolation and the structure of services in areas where many indigenous people live may all have contributed to this outcome. It also had found out that the resource allocation (fund) for indigenous people depends on their death rates while the death rates for indigenous people are about three times the national average.

It has been suggested if non-indigenous British were to pay 1% more per capita for health care; it would be possible to spend ...