While Australia is one of the leaders in healthcare in the world, there is a section of the country that suffers from severe health problems due to a lack of resource distribution, a history of colonialism and other factors.

 

The Aboriginal Peoples suffer an unique set of health problems that do not affect non-Indigenous women. This problem is the issue of substance and alcohol abuse. In 1990, the former Race Discrimination Commissioner received a number of letters from people concerned about the number of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory suffering from alcohol abuse and its effects on the populations. Alcohol has had a devastating effect on these communities ("Alcohol Report," 1996).  However, some communities have not been affected by substance abuse as much as others.

 

Let us take Utopia, Northern Territory as a case study. The question that researchers wanted to find out was how did the levels of health differ between communities? In order to work out the differences two studies were published by the Australian Government about the health of Utopia residents. One compares the health outcomes of people living in Utopia with those that were living in a large, more centralised community in Central Australia (Department of Health, 2008). The first study resulted in evidence of a large health difference in the adults in both communities with the residents of Utopia have a lower mortality rate largely due to the amount of alcohol related injuries than the other communities were facing. As well as having significantly lower rates of hospitalisation and were also less likely to develop diabetes. They also had a lower body-mass index (Department of Health, 2008).

 

Moving up north of Australia we come to an area made up of a number of Islands. These are referred to as the South Pacific Islands.

 

While data from this region is not readily available, I did find that they have one of the highest rates of malaria in the Pacific Region. This continues to be a major concern for women who are pregnant and children that are under the age of five.

 

Other infectious diseases that affect women are cardiovascular & respiratory diseases as well as neoplasm and malaria (UN Women: Asia and the Pacific, 2020).

 

Another aspect of  well-being that women and girls suffer with in the Solomon Islands is Domestic Violence. The country is amongst the highest in the world for domestic violence with an estimated two-thirds of women aged between 15-49 having experienced it (Australian Government: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2015).