Culturally Safe Support 

My Voice has been working in the Central Desert since 2019.  

We co-design our service delivery with local members of communities in the desert and are guided by senior members of the community. 

What are the features of our service

• We focus on the importance of language when delivering culturally safe services
• Recruiting and training in community.  We travel out to communities, taking our time to ensure that we have permissions to work with the community and the protocols we need to abide by.  More than 70% of our workforce in the Central Desert are First Nations people. We are local people with local management. 
• We provide Care in supported living environments and also in community. In Alice Springs we have men’s and women’s houses and, in the community, we ensure the right staff are matched to meet the participants needs.

We are led by clinicians.  We provide a high-quality service as reflected in our audit report.  Clinicians such as psychologists and speech therapists, supported by therapy assistants, train and guide our staff to be the best disability practitioner they can be. We know it is important to be present on the ground, but we also know that children and adults with disability need the best assessment and support.  So we have to balance working in community with building the capacity of local staff to deliver good care and we have to make sure that participants are getting high quality clinical oversight and direction. 

We do this by:  

• Being in each community at least once a week
• By training the local staff to know what to look for and how to be a good disability practitioner
• By having our Senior Advisory Committee of Traditional Owners co-design service delivery with our staff and the local remote community.
• By enabling quarterly respite care provision in Alice Springs (1 – 2 weeks in our facilities) so that our clinical team can spend intensive time looking at care needs, challenges and training of family and remote workers.
• By developing programs and support approaches only with the agreement and support of family and community and undertaking an educational approach to building capacity. 
• By engaging and promoting 2 way learning so we get it right.