The Greater Shepparton Foundation builds partnerships and collaborations to connect the needs of the local community with essential resources and skills to tackle and disrupt the cycle of disadvantage. The Foundation Features series will help shine a light on those driving change through innovative initiatives, as well as highlight community organisations that align with the foundation’s purpose.
The Greater Shepparton Healthy Child Co-Design project is well and truly under way, and we are thrilled with its progress to date, which is exceeding our expectations.
The project was established earlier this year to explore ways we could better connect our multicultural communities to our maternal and child health system.
Specifically, we are engaging with local parents and caregivers from both the Afghan and Congolese communities via our co-design advisory committee.
Maternal child health appointments are the first point of contact our community has with the healthcare system following the birth of a child and after leaving the hospital.
The 10 age and stage visits present a wonderful opportunity to build connection with families, support mothers and their babies to meet critical milestones and provide support for families.
To date, three advisory committee sessions have been held, with women from both our local Congolese and Afghan communities.
These sessions have provided a safe and inclusive environment for the women to come together and discuss the barriers and challenges they experience when accessing our local maternal and child health services.
The sessions have all been held at African House and have been a beautiful mix of women, their children, delicious food and rich storytelling.
In our most recent session, we were grateful to have three local Greater Shepparton City Council MCH nurses attend the session and provide their in-depth knowledge and answers to the women’s questions.
Each of the nurses commented how much they had learnt from the women. Understanding a person’s intricate culture and hearing their perspectives is such a powerful tool.
These conversations will go a long way in assisting their work moving forward.
This is one of the main strengths of a co-design project — it brings professional and lived experience together, and learning together produces stronger solutions, which consider different needs and perspectives.
We now turn our focus to the fourth and final community session, later in November, again at African House.
This will be our final co-design session, and we will go deeply into what the outcomes and solutions may look like.
Our Afghan and Congolese women will again come together with our local MCH nurses and as a group will discuss what possible changes could occur to ensure that our richly diverse community of women, can easily access local MCH services.
Together, we will put forward strong suggestions to help shape the system for the better.
We are grateful to and appreciative of our local co-design partners, who have supported us every step of the way: Greater Shepparton City Council, GV Health and the GV Public Health Unit.
Additionally, we are thankful for the financial support for this project from the Pratt Foundation, Besen Family Foundation and Impact Philanthropy.
For more information regarding GSF’s major projects, please go to greatershepparton.foundation
Until next time.
Katie Thorp
Greater Shepparton Healthy Child Co-Design project co-ordinator