Bulletin

Issue: May 2004

News

New Centre promotes refugee health

La Trobe University has established a new research centre in refugee health.

Based in the Faculty of Health Sciences on the main campus at Bundoora, the Refugee Health Research Centre (RHRC) is an innovative partnership between the University and the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture.

The Foundation is a non-profit community organisation which provides support and services for many of the 100,000 refugees currently in Australia who have fled torture, persecution and trauma in their homeland during the past ten years.

The RHRC has been set up to promote the health and well-being of refugee communities through activities ranging from research and teaching to continuing education and professional development.

The Centre has four priority areas for research: young people, refugee protection, newly emerging communities and service innovation and community strengthening. It will also examine growing problems of global displacement of populations and the abuse of human rights.

Launched late last year by the Victorian Minister for Health, Bronwyn Pike, its Director is Professor Sandy Gifford, a former foundation member of the University's Australian Research Centre in Health, Sex and Society. Professor Gifford comes to La Trobe from Deakin University and has taken up a Personal Chair in Public Health.

With its close links to refugee policy and practice, Professor Gifford says the RHRC is well placed to contribute to this much needed field of multidisciplinary research and practice.

One key study is already under way. Funded by VicHealth and co-ordinated by Ms Christine Bakopanos, it focuses on 200 newly arrived young people, aged from 13 to 18. They are being recruited through English language schools and through the Foundation's early intervention programs within the first three months of their arrival in Victoria. They are then followed over five years to 2008, to identify social determinants of health and well-being during settlement. Professor Gifford says virtually no research has been carried out into how to develop, implement and evaluate programs and policies aimed at young people from refugee backgrounds.

An important outcome of her study will be to identify the key issues of concern when they enter mainstream schools and then move into higher education or the workforce, and the ways in which they can be supported by schools, families, and youth and community services.

Professor Gifford's work takes her into the deepest abyss of inhumanity. She regularly deals with people who have 'experienced torture, trauma and dislocation in ways that are difficult to imagine - or even think about,' she says. Her previous work, as a medical anthropologist in India, dealt with HIV/AIDS prevention and care.

However, every day she goes home full of optimism. Why? Because, as she reminded students at a recent graduation ceremony, their profession in health and healing is about 'making this world a better place'. With support from La Trobe Dean of Health Sciences, Professor Stephen Duckett, and the Director the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture, Mr Paris Aristotle, she has been able to fulfil her vision of establishing the Centre to try and improve the lives of refugee and torture victims.

She believes health workers have an obligation to work with purpose and hope, qualities, she concedes, that can be difficult to sustain in a 'precarious world where more than 20 million people fall under the mandate of the UNHCR as refugees; where over 40 million people are living with HIV; where someone in the world is newly infected with TB bacilli every second and one-third of the world's population is living with this disease - and where there are at least 70 million landmines in 90 countries, killing or injuring at least 20,000 civilians every year.

'It is especially important to be engaged in the world at this point in time.'

Her aim is to develop the RHRC into 'a leading internationally recognised research centre in refugee health studies in the Asian Pacific region'.

Professor Gifford says the Centre aims to have between 10 to 15 staff, comprising research fellows, research assistants, community liaison officers as well as management and administrative personnel.

The most recent Research Fellow appointed is Dr Ignacio Correa-Velez. A Colombian medical graduate and specialist in family medicine and community health, he comes to the Centre from the University of Queensland where he undertook his PhD on complementary and alternative medicine and its impact on the quality of life of cancer patients. More recently he explored traditional healing practices among refugee communities in Brisbane.

Professor Gifford is establishing collaborative research links across the Faculties at La Trobe and with other academic institutions in Victoria, Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

She says the RHRC will provide professional development and research training and short courses for health professionals including general practitioners, nurses and social workers. It will conduct summer schools in refugee, health and settlement studies, and deliver a special stream within La Trobe's Master of Public Health program, for on and off campus delivery.

'We will also develop research and training specifically for people from refugee backgrounds. Culturally diverse, these activities will draw on refugee experience and make important contributions to the ongoing work of the RHRC.'

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