We hope you're enjoying the first few weeks of spring! We have certainly had a busy past couple of months here at The Water Well Project! With your help, we have facilitated 57 sessions to 1332 community participants - that's incredible 🤗. Keep up the wonderful work team!! 💪

Continue scrolling to see what else is news at The Water Well Project...

Welcome to our new volunteers 👋

In the past two months, we have held two Volunteer Induction Workshops; online at the end of July and at our Richmond Community Hub last weekend. We have welcomed 77 potential new volunteers from these two workshops. These events are great opportunities to meet more like-minded healthcare professionals, eager to share their skills and knowledge with refugee, migrant and asylum seeker communities. We are so excited to welcome these new volunteers to our team! 

This month, one of our fantastic Health Educators has shared with us their thoughts and reflections in the lead-up to a Health Education Session that they were facilitating on Mental Health...

I thought it would be useful to write about my ‘pre-flection’—the preparation I did before a session. The session was Mental Health and Wellbeing and the Community, a multicultural women's group of recently arrived migrants, mostly refugees of diverse cultural backgrounds and literacy levels.

As always, I start by reading the topic guide. I find them invaluable. As one of The Water Well Project's Health Educators, I contribute to the reviews and updates of these guides, so I know they contain evidence-based information, include additional references for you to explore, and include a list of support services that you can supplement with more local services.

Some of my own research for this session included reading this article published by the Australian Institute of Family Studies on Understanding the Mental Health and Help-seeking Behaviours of Refugees. It highlighted for me that despite refugees' exposure to significant psychosocial distress due to past and ongoing trauma and settlement challenges, they are less likely to seek professional help, with only around one-fifth of our refugee population seeking professional or informal help.

Reading about the barriers to accessing support to manage mental health, including poor mental health literacy, mixed cultural understandings of mental illness, and associated stigmas, reinforced for me that we are in a unique position to have an impact.  We meet communities in safe and trusted places and are health professionals who are respected and trusted by these communities, and we are taking the time to talk about this essential component of health that the women may not have spoken about before.

Another resource I used was the Beyond Blues model of Mental Health as a continuum. It helped frame the conversations about maintaining good mental health and recognising when we may need support. The idea of being about to move out of crisis and into recovery is a hopeful and positive one.

I found a deeper dive into preparation for this topic gave me a framework to have potentially difficult conversations but also reinforced for me that the relationships we have built with communities mean we have a real opportunity to make an impact on their health literacy.   

“This is a very valuable contribution which aids towards our wholistic goal to improve overall general health outcomes for our migrant and refugee students. Having a visible presentation with health care educators and translators is immensely valuable.”
~ Community Representative, Fitzroy Learning Network, Multicultural Student Group, Sleep, Exercise and Health session, July 2024.

“One of the young interpreters was very happy and said he will implicate health steps in his family now. I saw a student today doing exercises across the road on the steps of the town hall in their lunch break. The uptake of our healthy lunches has improved since your last visit about diabetes health.” 
~ (Community Representative, Fitzroy Learning Network, Multicultural Student Group, Sleep, Exercise and Health session, July 2024.

“Thank you very much for coming to our class today and discussing health and nutrition. Your explanations were very thorough and patient, helping us all understand the importance of a healthy diet better. Additionally, you answered our questions with patience and provided us with valuable information.

Once again, we appreciate your time and hope to benefit from your valuable knowledge and experience in the future.”
~ Community Participant, Swinburne University, EAL Class, Healthy Eating and Nutrition session, July 2024.

Question to our Volunteer Healthcare Professional Facilitators: have you learned anything from the session that may impact the way you practice in your usual healthcare setting?

“To allow for space for the patient to ask their own questions as they are often grasping a new concept and will approach it in a different way.”
~ Healthcare Professional Facilitator, MiCare Chinese Seniors Group, Heart Health session, July 2024.

“I feel more practiced using an interpreter for healthcare interactions, which is important for my work in the ED. I have a better understanding of the gaps in health literacy that CALD communities can face and how this impacts their health outcomes and engagement with our Australian health system.”
~ Healthcare Professional Facilitator, Red Cross Tasmania, Heart Health session, July 2024.

Donate today to give the gift of health literacy to people from migrant, refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds.

No longer wish to volunteer with The Water Well Project?