It is well recognised that medicine manifests social and cultural values and that the institution of healthcare cannot be structurally disengaged from the sociopolitical processes that create such values. As with many other indigenous peoples, Aboriginal Australians have a lower heath status than the rest of the community and frequently experience the effects of prejudice and racism in many aspects of their lives. In this paper the authors highlight values and ethical convictions that may be held by Aboriginal peoples in (...) order to explore how health practitioners can engage Aboriginal patients in a manner that is more appropriate. In doing so the authors consider how the ethics, values, and beliefs of the dominant white Australian culture have framed the treatment and delivery of services that Aboriginal people receive, and whether sufficient effort has been made to understand or acknowledge the different ethical predispositions that form the traditions and identity of Aboriginal Australia. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss and critically evaluate the National Health and Medical Research Council’s recently released document entitled ‘Draft Values and Ethics in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research’. We provide a brief account of its development, philosophy and contents, and then consider how the document could be used by HRECs. We recommend that three specially targeted documents be developed from this one document, to meet the particular needs of HRECs, Indigenous people and researchers. We propose a system (...) of Indigenous ethics advisers as a way to implement the central ideas of the new draft guidelines, without falling into the legalism and rule-following that these guidelines explicitly aim to avoid. (shrink)