Problem:  Townsville Cancer Centre provides video‐consultation (VC) services to patients in rural/remote regions of North Queensland in order to improve access to specialist cancer care. The experience and responses of indigenous patients using this service have not been studied. Our objective is to assess the level of satisfaction and the responses of Indigenous patients, their families and health workers (HWs) to VC and such teleoncology service.Design:  Descriptive study, using semistructured interviews.Setting:  Tertiary referral centre (Townsville Cancer Centre) and various rural and remote towns in Queensland.Key measures for improvement:  Satisfaction levels of Indigenous patients, their family members and Indigenous HWs with various aspects of the teleoncology service.Lessons learnt:  Our evaluation suggests that teleoncology is an acceptable model of care for Indigenous patients, with high levels of satisfaction expressed from patients, families and HWs. Health professionals involved with providing this service need to be adaptive to the needs of individual patients and local communities in order to provide culturally appropriate care. Formal skills training for staff, effective communication between specialist and local HWs, and informed consent procedures are essential to maintain safety of practices. Strategies for change are: Mandatory informed consent procedure for all patients offered with VC. Formalised competency training for staff in skills essential to maintain safe practices in teleoncology. Clear clinical documentation to facilitate improved communication in patient management between medical staff at main centre and distant sites. Further efforts in promotion, education and support for staff to participate in telemedicine.

BACKGROUND: The Australian National Cervical Screening Program, introduced more than 20 years ago, does not record the Indigenous status of screening participants. This article reports the first population‐based estimates of participation in cervical screening for Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australian women.METHODS: This was a retrospective, population‐based study of 1,334,795 female Queensland residents, aged 20 to 69 years, who participated in cervical screening from 2000 to 2011; 26,829 were identified as Indigenous through linkage to hospitalization records. Participation rates were calculated as the number of women screened divided by the average estimated resident population, with adjustments made for hysterectomies, for each 2‐, 3‐, and 5‐year screening period. Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), which were adjusted for age group, place of residence, and socioeconomic disadvantage.RESULTS: In 2010‐2011, the 2‐year participation rate was 55.7% (95% CI, 55.6%‐55.9%) for non‐Indigenous women and 33.5% (95% CI, 32.9%‐34.1%) for Indigenous women; this represented a decrease from 2000‐2001 (57.7% [95% CI, 57.6%‐57.9%] and 35.3% [95% CI, 34.5%‐36.1%], respectively). The difference between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous women was greatest for those aged 45 to 49 years. The 3‐ and 5‐year participation rates were higher within both groups, and the absolute differences between the 2 groups were larger. Significant interactions between the Indigenous status and the place of residence and socioeconomic disadvantage highlight that the Indigenous/non‐Indigenous differential was evident in all places of residence except for very remote areas (OR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.95‐1.02) and was greatest in the most affluent areas (OR, 0.26; 95% CI, 0.24‐0.27).CONCLUSIONS: Indigenous Australian women participate less than non‐Indigenous women, and this gap has not closed. These results provide important benchmarks for the new Australian cervical screening program commencing in 2017, which will provide opportunities to reduce inequities for Indigenous women and address longstanding data deficiencies in the collection of the Indigenous status. Cancer 2016;122:1560–9. © 2016 The Authors. Cancer published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Cancer Society.

Wellbeing is culturally bound and is shaped by many aspects of life, including experiences, beliefs and values. As such, in order to accurately measure wellbeing for a specific cultural group, it is necessary to understand the experiences, beliefs and values that influence the conception and experience of wellbeing of that group. This paper presents a conceptual model of wellbeing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which was developed from a large national qualitative study that explored the views of 359 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults. An Aboriginal- and Torres Strait Islander-led research team used an Indigenist research approach to iteratively develop this conceptual model, called the Fabric of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing model, which takes inspiration from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander weaving traditions whereby individual strands are twined to create fabrics that are both beautiful and strong. This reflects our findings that the parts of life that are most important to wellbeing for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are interwoven with their families, communities and culture.

This paper outlines the development of Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of research building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater understanding of the enablers to building a transdisciplinary collective of Indigenist researchers. The potential benefits include a more sustainable, relational, and ethical approach to advancing new knowledge, and health outcomes, for Indigenous people in its fullest sense.

The realisation for Indigenous people in Australia to be counted in official statistics occurred in 1967. The identification of Indigenous people in Australia in national data requires historical and contemporary issues to be considered. This include