Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Apr 25;6(4):e010792.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010792.

Building better research partnerships by understanding how Aboriginal health communities perceive and use data: a semistructured interview study

Christian Young  1 , Allison Tong  1 , Simone Sherriff  2 , Deanna Kalucy  3 , Peter Fernando  3 , Sumithra Muthayya  3 , Jonathan C Craig  1
Affiliations

Building better research partnerships by understanding how Aboriginal health communities perceive and use data: a semistructured interview study

Christian Young et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Objective: To describe the attitudes and beliefs of health professionals working in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS) towards the access, usage and potential value of routinely obtained clinical and research data.

Design, setting and participants: Face-to-face, semistructured interviews were conducted with 35 health professionals from 2 urban and 1 regional ACCHS in New South Wales. The interviews were transcribed and themes were identified using an adapted grounded theory approach.

Results: Six major themes were identified: occupational engagement (day-to-day relevance, contingent on professional capacity, emphasising clinical relevance), trust and assurance (protecting ownership, confidence in narratives, valuing local sources), motivation and empowerment (engaging the community, influencing morale, reassuring and encouraging clients), building research capacity (using cultural knowledge, promoting research aptitude, prioritising specific data), optimising service provision (necessity for sustainable services, guiding and improving services, supporting best practice), and enhancing usability (ensuring ease of comprehension, improving efficiency of data management, valuing accuracy and accessibility).

Conclusions: Participants were willing to learn data handling procedures that could further enhance health service delivery and enable more ACCHS-led research, but busy workloads restrict these opportunities. Staff held concerns regarding the translation of research data into beneficial services, and believed that the outcome and purpose of data collection could be communicated more clearly. Promoting research partnerships, ensuring greater awareness of positive health data and the purposes of data collection, and communicating data in a user-friendly format are likely to encourage greater data use, build research capacity and improve health services within the Aboriginal community.

Keywords: ACCHS; Aboriginal; Capacity building; Data; QUALITATIVE RESEARCH.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Thematic schema.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Phillips B, Morrell S, Taylor R et al. A review of life expectancy and infant mortality estimations for Australian Aboriginal people. BMC Public Health 2014;14:1. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Paul CL, Sanson-Fisher R, Stewart J et al. Being sorry is not enough: the sorry state of the evidence base for improving the health of indigenous populations. Am J Prev Med 2010;38:566–8. - PubMed
    1. Stewart JC, Parter C, Maher L. Building a strategic approach to improve Aboriginal health research and evaluation in NSW. N S W Public Health Bull 2012;23:87–91. - PubMed
    1. Johnston L, Doyle J, Morgan B et al. A review of programs that targeted environmental determinants of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Int J Environ Res Public Health 2013;10:3518–42. 10.3390/ijerph10083518 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Eades SJ, Taylor B, Bailey S et al. The health of urban Aboriginal people: insufficient data to close the gap. Med J Aust 2010;193:521–4. - PubMed

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources