Australian Indigenous

A review of the literature on disability services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

This review is also available as a downloadable PDF using Adobe Acrobat.

• The use of disability support services
• Issues affecting the access by Indigenous people to disability services

The use of disability support services

As a part of the Commonwealth State/Territory Disability Agreement (CSTDA: previously Commonwealth State Disability Agreement (CSDA)), information about the use of disability support services covered by these agreements has been collected on a ‘snapshot’ day each year. On the 2002 snapshot day, 1,670 or 2.5% of CSDA consumers (or 2.7%, excluding the 5% of consumers for whom Indigenous status was not stated) were identified as being of Indigenous origin [26].^xi This was very similar to the proportion (2.6%) of Indigenous Australians in the general population aged under 65 years [36].

Overall, two-fifths (42%) of all CSDA consumers reported needing continual support in ‘activities of daily living’ (self-care, mobility and/or communication) [26]. A slightly higher proportion of Indigenous consumers of a CSDA service reported this need (46%) than did other consumers (42%). Around 15% of Indigenous consumers reported needing no support with activities of daily living (including those who needed only aids) as did 19% of non-Indigenous consumers.

The number of times services were used by Indigenous people was greater than the number that would have been expected if the age-specific use of services by Indigenous people was the same as that of all consumers. However, if one considers the much higher level of disability documented for one Indigenous sub-population [28], then these data suggest that one out of three Indigenous people with a disability did not use the services available [37].^xii If this apparently low level of usage is true, it could be due to differences between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of disability (and responses to disability) and/or the fact that Indigenous people do not know enough about the services available.

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Issues affecting the access by Indigenous people to disability services

There is a wide variety of issues affecting the access of Indigenous people with a disability to support services. Some of these issues relate to specific environments – such as urban, rural and remote locations – but many share commonalities based on cultural, historical and socioeconomic factors. These commonalities are such that a recent House of Representatives’ inquiry into the needs of urban dwelling Indigenous people noted that there was a ‘continuum rather than an absolute distinction between urban and non-urban contexts’ [40, p3].

The commonalities are also of such importance to the uptake of services by Indigenous people that the following sections have been structured according to issues of that type, rather than according to the urban, rural and remote location. This is not to say, of course, that geographic location is not important, but rather that many of the issues faced by Indigenous people are similar regardless of location. Generally, however, the service-related issues faced by Indigenous people living in remote and very remote locations can be characterised by their availability – that is, many services are just not available.^xiii At the other end of the geographic continuum, in the major cities, the characteristic service-related issue faced by Indigenous people is their accessibility – that is, they may be physically available, but, for a variety of reasons, may not be readily accessible [38-40]. These aspects are considered more fully in the following sections.

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Last updated: 23 February, 2005