Are you sitting comfortably? Well, perhaps you shouldn’t be. When it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, we’ve known the statistics showing the gap in health outcomes for a while now. While there have been some improvements, they have not so far been at the rate required to meet the Closing the Gap targets.
As doctors, when we see a problem, we see a need for education. Education, of course, is helpful, but perhaps not all education, and it may well be that we get trapped in hidden curricula that obstruct us from making real progress. In our thinking and teaching about Aboriginal health, we fall back on what makes us comfortable in medical education, and this leads us to think about Aboriginal health in ways which are incomplete and unhelpful.
