Focus on health of community

Women’s health was in the spotlight on Wednesday at St Paul’s African House as about 75 women attended a community health forum.

The Wise Well Women forum was planned to be held last year, but was cancelled because of lockdown, making Wednesday’s event the first in Shepparton.

Wise Well Women co-convener Christine Nunn said the event was timed to line up with refugee week, reflecting the women and children of diverse communities in attendance who may not have had as much access to health information.

Ms Nunn said topics of discussion included mental and physical health, youth and children’s health, sexual health and gambler’s health, while vaccines were also available later in the day.

She said Wise Well Women had asked attendees of vaccination seminars earlier this year and late last year what health information they needed, with those subjects spoken about on Wednesday at African House.

“Today is about trying to tease those topics out a little bit, to give us a sense of what (these communities) need in more detail down the track,” Ms Nunn said.

She said they would use information from the forum to try to target different communities depending on what information they needed.

She said it was important, especially for some subjects like sexual health, to give women a safer space to talk about more taboo subjects without husbands, brothers and other male family members in the room.

Gamblers’ Help community engagement workers Steph Bryne and Freddy Thuruthikattu were at the seminar.

She said it was important to increase the awareness of the support services that were available for gamblers and their families.

“It’s a hidden issue, and it’s related to so many other social issues, whether it’s family violence, drug and alcohol addiction, they all interrelate and just helping people understand that there are free and confidential support services available,” she said.

“For every single problem gambler there are six other people affected, so it’s important to provide the support services for all people who are affected by gambling.”

Mr Thuruthikattu said they had spoken about the harms of gambling, what different forms it came in and how it affected different age groups, and said working with different multicultural groups was important.