Ian Anderson: transforming Indigenous medicine and education
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Ian
Anderson's trailblazing endeavours began long before he became well
known for his work with Australia's Indigenous communities. Born in
Tasmania, his father was an agricultural labourer and his mother's
Indigenous Australian family have links to the northeast of the island.
The family moved around rural Australia frequently, and when they
settled in Bendigo, Victoria, he became one of the first in his family
to finish high school. Now Pro Vice-Chancellor of Engagement at the
University of Melbourne, Anderson has seen first-hand the challenges
that Indigenous communities face in both services received and
development opportunities.
It was work experience as a
physiotherapist that led him to study medicine at the University of
Melbourne, which had only about a dozen Indigenous Australians on all
courses at that time. He became more aware of the hardships faced by
Indigenous Australians during his studies, especially his time at
Melbourne's Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (VAHS). “I started
understanding why primary health care for Indigenous Australians was so
important, and the experience inspired me to finish my medical degree”,
he says. “People began to connect with me, and I feel it was a turning
point as there was only one Aboriginal doctor in Australia back then.”
After
graduation, he worked as a clinician in general practice, emergency
medicine, and again at VAHS. “I was seeing lots of chronic diseases at
younger ages in Indigenous Australians, sadly still the case today”, he
says. “There are also high degrees of social distress, mental health,
drug and alcohol problems, as well as child health issues—very
challenging for primary health.” At age 29, he became the Chief
Executive of VAHS, which led him into health service management and
development. Later, he worked for Australia's Federal Government,
encouraging it to take a stronger focus on Aboriginal health policy and
service development, which saw the country's first national strategy on
Indigenous sexual health in 1997. “As Principal Medical Adviser in the
Australian Government Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Health, Ian was responsible for installing evidence at the heart of
public health strategy”, says Robert Griew, Associate Secretary for
Higher Education for the Australian Government.
Anderson's
interest in policy initiatives began to grow. “I saw there were just a
handful of universities that played a role in producing graduates that
had influence in health and medical policy”, he says. “I realised
Australia needed to change how professional values were created in the
classroom.” On returning to the University of Melbourne, he set up a
programme with Indigenous Australian communities that addressed medical
education and research in a way that would lead to meaningful impact.
“Indigenous health had to be taught as part of all health, not in
isolation”, he says. Advocacy work by the Australian Indigenous Doctors'
Association, the Australian Medical Association, and other professional
bodies in the late 1990s encouraged university deans to take ownership
of Indigenous health, creating a context in which Anderson and his team
could lead on a national curriculum framework, launched in 2004.
“Institutions such as the University of Newcastle, NSW, led the way
here”, says Anderson. His team worked with the Australian Medical
Council to develop standards to give accreditation to Australian medical
schools, forcing them to take Indigenous health seriously. These
standards have influenced the development of an Indigenous health
curriculum and have driven initiatives to support the enrolment of
Indigenous Australian students into medicine. “He was in the vanguard of
the Indigenous doctors' movement, saw the transformative power of the
creation of Indigenous professionals”, says Griew.
In
2007, the Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education Network was developed
through Anderson's leadership, fostering collaboration between medical
schools in Australia and New Zealand. A milestone was reached in 2012
when the proportion of first-year Indigenous Australian medical students
reached 2·6% of all Australian medical students—the same proportion of
Indigenous people in the general population. There are now about 200
qualified Indigenous doctors and 310 enrolled medical students in
Australia. “We have a long way to go to reach workforce parity—but this
shows that change is possible”, says Anderson. These achievements are
important says Malcolm King, Director of the Canadian Institutes of
Health Research Institute of Aboriginal Peoples' Health at Simon Fraser
University: “Ian has worked tirelessly to ensure that other Indigenous
Australians have opportunities for health professional training. A
leader in his field, a pioneer in Indigenous medical education and
health research, Ian has been a role model for us all.”
Another
of his concerns is Indigenous health worldwide, and he's currently
coordinating a global report card on the health of Indigenous and tribal
peoples on the behalf of The Lancet and the Lowitja Institute
in Australia. It's challenging work since, as he explains, “in some
regions, there are significant problems with a lack of data
availability, while others, such as Sweden, have restrictions on the
collection of ethnicity data.”
In his current role with colleagues across the university including Murrup Barak,
the Melbourne Institute for Indigenous Development which he directs,
Anderson is building a broader revolution in Indigenous education with
the aim of increasing Indigenous representation in all professions. He
hopes the strategy he's developing will see Indigenous students
flourish: “We need to build the Indigenous economy, and this cannot be
established without Indigenous university graduates.”
