Improving the health of vulnerable groups: addressing health inequities through applied public health research

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Copyright: Quinn, Emma
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Abstract
In Australia, there continues to be large gaps in health outcomes between the most vulnerable in our population and those with the available resources e.g. income, education, housing and employment to advance their health. In this thesis, I present five applied public health research projects that share a common theme, an intention to improve the health of vulnerable groups in New South Wales (NSW). These vulnerable groups include: Aboriginal people, rural and remote communities (including mothers and babies) and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Chapter Two describes the process of redesigning the population-based Get Healthy Telephone and Information Service for Aboriginal people, which was undertaken in order to strengthen efforts to prevent the chronic disease burden experienced by this vulnerable group. Chapter Three describes a research study conducted to better understand the barriers and facilitators to implementing a midwifery-led care model for pregnant women in remote communities, in order to address inequities in perinatal and maternal health and provide more locally appropriate care for these vulnerable women. Chapter Four presents two related but methodologically distinct research studies. The first systematically synthesises the evidence on the epidemiology and social determinants of communicable diseases in rural and remote communities. The second investigates the social and environmental reasons behind why human – bat exposures continue to occur in northern rural NSW at the risk of Australian bat lyssavirus infection. These studies provide new understanding of how to better design primary prevention strategies to alleviate the disease risk experienced by rural and remote communities as a vulnerable group. Chapter Five presents an investigation into routine communicable disease surveillance data in Australia and how these data can be analysed to describe disease risk for diverse ethnocultural groups in our population, in order to inform community-level prevention and control activity for this vulnerable group. These five applied public health research projects are shown to have generated new evidence or insights about application of evidence in public health practice to improve the health of vulnerable groups in NSW.
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Author(s)
Quinn, Emma
Supervisor(s)
Seale, Holly
Torvaldsen, Siranda
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Publication Year
2014
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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download public version.pdf 5.69 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
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