St George Community Wellbeing Centre
Partners: Goondir Health Services, Southern Queensland Rural Health, University of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health & Rural Medical School, and the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation
Goondir Health Service has established the collaborative St George Community Wellbeing Centre (SGCWBC) to address health and social needs identified by the local Indigenous community. This Indigenous-led intervention aims to reduce community-wide chronic disease incidence and risk factors by proactively addressing physical, social, emotional, and cultural wellbeing through wrap-around, place-based prevention and community building programs and support services.
The SGCWBC activities target all life stages from pre-conception, early childhood, children and young people, new parents, adults and older people. Activities span across health and social emotional wellbeing services, social support, cultural development, youth engagement and empowerment, women empowerment, training and education, exercise and fitness, food security, nutrition and healthy lifestyle interventions and enterprise. The partnership-based approach of the SGCWBC was designed in close collaboration with consumers and multiple organisations around the region and draws on the experience and knowledge of these institutions. These partnerships include a range of health, education, training, social services, and counselling and wellbeing service providers.
CSIRO was contracted by Goondir Health Services to co-design the SGCWBC Research and Evaluation Framework to generate evidence of the SGCWBC model of care chronic disease prevention delivery, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and scalability. The Indigenous Health Program is now involved in co-delivering the implementation of this framework. Funding for this work was secured via CSIRO’s Indigenous Research Grants scheme. The SGCWBC evaluation plan incorporates process and impact measures to assess delivery and effectiveness of programs and the centre as a whole. Part of this work has included conducting scoping reviews of the peer-reviewed and grey literature to investigate wellbeing indicators and methodologies to guide best-practice SGCWBC data collection procedures.
Pictured: Tiana Thorne, Professor Ray Mahoney, and Megan Rebuli at the St George Wellbeing Centre
As part of this work, members of the team have conducted a scoping review looking at screening tools to measure food insecurity in high-income countries. The published paper is available to read here.
For more information on the St George Wellbeing Centre, visit Goondir Health Service’s website.
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