The Apunipima Baby One Program is a health worker led family visiting service that begins in pregnancy and continues up to the first 1000 days of a child’s life. Framed within Apunipima’s holistic family centred model of care, the program aims to empower health workers to feel confident in exchanging knowledge and increase opportunities for them to share timely health promotion messages with families in Cape York.
As part of this program’s ongoing quality improvement, health workers highlighted a need for greater support to have difficult conversations with families; to tackle important and sensitive issues whilst showing respect and not offending clients. Health workers identified the most challenging yarning topics in the program as: domestic violence; drinking in pregnancy; smoking in pregnancy; sexually transmitted infections and; child safety.
A project was undertaken to develop a video resource tool to support health workers have these ‘Hard Yarns’ with families participating in the Baby One Program. Working with a filmmaker with a health background, the team created characters and a script that reflected issues they were facing. A nominated team member took on the role of director and filming was done on site in Cape York. Apunipima health workers gained new skills and professional knowledge through these stages of production.
This project resulted in the production of two versions of a ‘Hard Yarns’ video resource. The first is a family visiting tool, to help health workers engage with pregnant women and family members participating in the Baby One Program. The second is designed as a training tool for teaching health workers to have difficult conversations with families.
This project allowed for the health workers to identify the needs of their program and go onto develop resources to better support them in the delivery of this program. By investing in a health worker led and inclusive process from beginning to end, the resulting ‘Hard Yarns’ video resource is culturally strong and appropriate for families in the Cape. Furthermore, this project has strengthened health workers capacity to support families and exchange health promotion knowledge within a family centred maternal and child health program.