Safe Koori Kids: Community based approaches to Indigenous injury prevention

The study will involve the development of an intervention targeting Indigenous children, schools and families and schools in urban environments. Specifically, over a three year period, the proposed research aims to: explore the incidence and impact of intentional and unintentional injury in selected urban Indigenous communities in NSW and identify factors contributing to positive and negative consequences relating to injury; develop and evaluate initiatives in Indigenous communities aimed at increasing resiliency in at-risk children, youth and families; and make recommendations for changes to policy and practice across a range of government portfolios and non-government organisations. Injury, which has received almost no research attention among Indigenous populations, is the leading cause of death, illness and disability for young Australians with the burden of injury for Indigenous Australians significantly higher than for the non-Indigenous population. Indigenous children and youth are over-represented in both intentional (eg. suicide, domestic violence and abuse, assaults and self-harm) and unintentional (eg. burns, road injury, falls and drowning) injury statistics. The complexity of injury to Indigenous people and its 'downstream' impact on families and communities has been documented in recent studies and reports. Although Indigenous children and youth are particularly vulnerable to the impact of injury, there have been few studies that have documented the incidence and impact of injury on Indigenous children or which have offered sustainable and culturally acceptable solutions to the problem of injury. The proposed research focuses on the development of effective, sustainable and culturally acceptable interventions for Indigenous children and youth based on an Indigenous perspective.