Excellence in teaching

Associate Professor Konrad Jamrozik of the Department of Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry received a Small Grant for Innovative Teaching in 1994. He teaches a range of public health subjects and specialises in epidemiology.

Each year several groups of students choose to study aspects of Aboriginal health for their compulsory project in community health, but we have not had the resources for them to travel outside of Perth for this purpose. The Innovative Teaching grant has allowed us for the first time to take a group of Third Year medical students on a field trip to some remote Aboriginal communities.

The field trip provided an opportunity for the nine students to see parts of the State that they rarely, if ever, visit and to meet and talk with Aboriginal people and health workers in rural and remote areas. They saw first-hand the conditions under which residents of fringe-settlements live and were able to contrast these with another Aboriginal community that is settled, well-housed and well-organized. There were opportunities too, to consider the challenges of providing health and preventive medical services to small populations scattered over vast distances, and to appreciate the working conditions and risks to health in the mining industry. The students even spent time walking around two cemeteries to see what they revealed of the history and health of the local communities.

While a significant proportion of the Aboriginal population now lives in urban areas, the Mabo decision is likely to result in more Aboriginal people returning to their traditional lands. The medical students learnt that Aboriginal culture and languages are alive and sophisticated, and most met and talked to more Aboriginal people in five days than they had in their lifetime. The greatest changes in their knowledge, as seen from questionnaires completed before and after the trip, concerned the behaviour of doctors-which Aboriginal people might find alienating or even offensive. Most responses to questions on attitudes to Aboriginal people and issues moved in positive directions. All students said the would do the trip again if given the opportunity and said they would recommend it to peers.

While I was confident that the trip was an important landmark in the response of the states's only Medical School to the health problems of the most disadvantaged group in our community, there was a degree of tentativeness in both the students and the local Aboriginal people. The rigid and crowded medical curriculum does not encourage initiative and flexibility in our students, and their glimpse into the richness and complexity of Aboriginal life and culture seemed to hold them back in making contacts within the host community. For their part, Aboriginal people in a remote settlement have rarely been in a situation where white people from the city come to learn from them rather than to do for, or to, them. Once the ice was broken, however, things went smoothly and productively. I, too, would do it all again.